Microsoft continues to add AI features to its Bing search engine, even beyond the GPT-powered chat features it’s pushing. According to a feature roundup blog post, Bing will now “create AI-generated stories” for some searches, giving you a small multimedia presentation about the thing you looked up. The company says it’s a way to let you “consume bite-sized information” as you search certain topics.
The stories are similar to the ones you’d find on social media platforms like Instagram or Snapchat, with a progress bar to tell you when it moves to the next slide. Slides contain text explaining what you searched for, as well as related images and videos. You can also turn the sound of the story back on so that a voice reads the text, complete with background music.
The stories don’t show up on every search — when a colleague and I tried, we made them show up when we looked up “Cubism,” “Impressionism,” and “Tai Chi,” but not for terms like “iPhone,” “Apple,” or ” Spokane’s best restaurants. To be fair, not every search needs a story; if I’m just looking for food, I don’t think I’d like a robot voice reading the history of my local food culture.
Microsoft says stories will be available to people who search in English, French, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Arabic.
The company also announced that it will be upgrading the “knowledge cards” that appear to the right of search results, saying it has “expanded the richness and breadth of knowledge cards supported by Bing using generative AI.” The cards can contain their own stories (I searched for Seattle, and it offered two stories), as well as elements such as timelines about the history of a country, city, or event.
