How to Use Bing AI to Get the Answers You Need

This article explains how to access and use Bing AI, including details on its capabilities and limitations.

How to Use Bing AI Search

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that’s based on GPT-4o, which is a version of the same technology that’s behind ChatGPT.

The chatbot is free to use, and it displays answers alongside traditional search results. You can also interact with the Bing AI chatbot directly by clicking the Chat link on the Bing homepage, in which case traditional search results are replaced entirely by natural language responses from the AI in a process that will seem familiar if you’ve ever used ChatGPT.

Here’s how to use Bing AI search:

1. Navigate to Bing.com and sign in.

   Bing AI search isn’t available if you aren’t signed in, so create a Microsoft account and sign in if you don’t already have one. If you're using Edge, you can also access it by clicking the blue b in the upper right corner of the browser.

2. Type a question or request into the new Bing AI search field, and press enter.

3. Bing will display traditional search results on the left, and you may see a Bing AI chatbot box on the right. To interact with the AI, click See more in the AI chatbot box.

   If you don't see any AI results, click Chat at the top of the page, or scroll up beyond the first search result to access the Bing AI chatbot directly.

4. Click Let's chat to access the AI chatbot.
   

5. Enter additional requests in the chatbox.
   

6. You can continue entering additional requests, and the chatbot will remember previous requests and replies until you click New topic to start fresh.
   

How to Adjust the Bing AI Chatbot Conversation Style

The Bing chatbot has three conversation styles that impact the answers it provides to you. 

Here’s how to access and use this setting:

1. Navigate to bing.com and click Chat.

2. Click one of the conversation style options.

   • More Creative: This option gives the AI free reign in answering your questions, but it’s more likely to get things wrong or provide strange answers.
   • More Balanced: This is the best option in most scenarios, as it provides a little creativity without things getting too weird.
     
   • More Precise: Use this option if you want basic answers with less of a chance of incorrect or fabricated information.

   Clicking a different conversation style after you have already asked a question will reset the chatbot, so you’ll need to start your conversation over again.

3. Try experimenting with different modes for different tasks. More Balanced is the best option for most tasks, but More Creative can surprise you with interesting ideas and concepts, and More Precise is typically better at providing correct information.

How Do the Bing AI Chatbot Conversation Styles Work?

Bing AI's conversation styles impact the way that it answers your questions, by allowing it to get more creative, or restrict it to more factual answers without any flair or inventiveness. As an example of the difference between More Balanced and More Precise, the chatbot provides this result when set to More Balanced:

This is clearly wrong and based on outdated information, but it’s also quite in-depth and would be a useful answer if it wasn’t based on a false premise.

In this case, it’s easy to see that the chatbot made a mistake, in which case you can point that out and receive a better answer:

For comparison, this is the result when set to More Precise:

While the chatbot didn’t make the same mistake here, it also didn’t provide the same level of potentially useful information.

The difference in these modes is also apparent when you ask Bing AI to perform a creative task, like writing a story or a poem. Here's Bing AI's response when asked to write a story about a funny animal using the More Precise setting:

In contrast, it provides a much longer story with more details when given the same prompt using the More Creative setting:

What Else Can the Bing AI Chatbot Do?

The Bing AI Chatbot is based on GPT-4o, so it can do most of the same things that you can do with ChatGPT. You can ask it to draft an email, write an essay or a poem, help you decide on a new purchase like a TV or computer, create comparison charts, analyze data, and perform a variety of other tasks.

You can also ask it to look up things like writing styles and then apply that research to a separate task. For example, you could ask it to look up the writing style of a favorite author and then ask it to write a series of imaginary tweets in that style. You can get fairly creative with your use of the chatbot, as it's capable of performing a wide variety of tasks with a lot of flexibility, as long as you don't ask it to do something that Microsoft trained it to not do.

What Are the Limits of the Bing AI Chatbot?

Microsoft has placed a few restrictions on the Bing AI chatbot, primarily related to the ways that people are able to interact with it. It will refuse to perform some tasks due to restrictions placed by Microsoft. For example, if you ask it to write a series of angry tweets in the style of a particular author, it will tell you about the author's style but refuse to write the tweets as they could potentially offend or hurt someone. If you remove the angry modifier though, it will generate the tweets even if the requested subject matter is negative.

Microsoft places a limit on the number of questions you can ask the Bing chatbot without starting a new session, which is at least partially due to the fact that it can become erratic without periodic resets. If you notice that it’s providing strange results or refusing to answer queries, you can always click the broom icon to start over.

The Bing chatbot doesn’t always behave in the exact way you might expect it to. It can give wildly different answers to the same prompt if asked across multiple sessions, it can get things wrong or seem to make things up, and it can even outright refuse to perform tasks. It's more likely to generate strange answers when set to More Creative, and when you've already sent a lot of messages without starting a new session. When it does that, you can typically start a new session or phrase your request differently. For example, instead of asking it to write an essay on a specific topic, you might ask it to write a sample or imaginary essay on the same topic.