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Microsoft Windows AI

Microsoft Brings Its New AI-powered Bing To the Windows 11 Taskbar (theverge.com) 39

Microsoft is releasing an update to Windows 11 today that adds the company's new AI-powered Bing search to the taskbar. From a report: The new Windows 11 update will offer quick access to the new Bing chat feature alongside a bunch of new features. Windows 11 is also getting improvements to widgets, a better touch mode, a screen recording feature, tabs inside Notepad, and more. The new Bing integration is a surprise addition that Microsoft hasn't been testing with its Windows Insiders. A new Bing icon will appear within the search box in the taskbar, with Microsoft highlighting the new chat answers experience in the search flyout. While chat answers won't be available directly within the search flyout, Windows 11 users will be able to quickly start a Bing chat in Edge from here -- providing they have access to the Bing preview. Microsoft is also opening up a preview of its Phone Link app for iOS, meaning iPhone users can link their devices to Windows. This will include access to send and receive messages (yes, even iMessage), calls, and notifications.
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Microsoft Brings Its New AI-powered Bing To the Windows 11 Taskbar

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  • by guest reader ( 2623447 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @10:23AM (#63329823)

    Microsoft Brings Its New AI-powered Bing To the Windows 11 Taskbar

    ... and no one can use it, because everyone is in the waiting list

    • by Fuck_this_place ( 2652095 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @10:30AM (#63329851)

      Microsoft Brings Its New AI-powered Bing To the Windows 11 Taskbar

      ... and no one can use it, because everyone is in the waiting list

      Well, I was going to say The End has Come, but I guess it will have to wait....

      • Microsoft Brings Its New AI-powered Bing To the Windows 11 Taskbar

        ... and no one can use it, because everyone is in the waiting list

        Well, I was going to say The End has Come, but I guess it will have to wait....

        Fuck! More waiting? That fucking sucks! I am tired of waiting!

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Took like 2 days on the waitlist to get access for myself.
  • Great!! (Score:4, Funny)

    by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @10:28AM (#63329845)

    Best news ever,. Totally radical I can have yet another AI failure on my desktop producing useless results.

    Microsoft Please place it next to Cortana and Clippy,so I can keep the useless pieces of your OS together.

    • Best news ever,. Totally radical I can have yet another AI failure on my desktop producing useless results.

      Microsoft Please place it next to Cortana and Clippy,so I can keep the useless pieces of your OS together.

      Don't you mean acting as a data source for their building of the product so it's less useless to others in the future, you know, after another company has produced something very superior to said end product you're, without official consent, giving data sets to? ;)

      *gasp for air*

      I know that's a mouth full, but that tends to be the path MS follows.

      Well these days they might just be selling the data off to another company that's building "the product", whatever that ends up being... but it will, nevertheless,

    • Re:Great!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @11:20AM (#63329985) Journal

      BobHAL 9000

      "My God, it's full of...spam!"

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The dream is to have a Star Trek like computer (TNG era) that you can ask natural language questions, and get an accurate answer. You can even ask it do work for you, like narrowing down database entries by additional criteria.

      Unfortunately ChatGPT and the rest are very, very far away from being able to do that. They have no understanding of the material they use for reference, and are poor at even pulling basic factual information out of it.

      They really are just an evolution of Eliza. Very convincing at tim

      • I know. It is fairly easy to corrupt their words entirely. At best bing AI should produce more accurate search results. In reality they will over ride the programming so many times to promote specific products companies that it will be useless

        Remember the correct answer to bing searches is usually 10th on the list. The other 9 being paid advertisements pretending to be useful

    • Re:Great!! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rogoshen1 ( 2922505 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @12:09PM (#63330147)

      funny how whenever MS rolls out a new feature, the most common reaction seems to be
      >how do i disable it
      really, MS should take that as a learning opportunity

      • by taustin ( 171655 )

        If they did, they'd roll out a new feature to disable things, and people would need to figure out how to disable that.

        • by Entrope ( 68843 )

          Hi, I'm Clippy, your natural language assistant! It looks like you're trying to "Disable Clippy". Can I help you with that?!

          • by taustin ( 171655 )

            Clippy, how do I light my computer on fire, and where is the nearest swamp to throw it into?

          • by gtall ( 79522 )

            No, no, no Mr. Clippy, I'm BingBot the real natural language whizzy. You are a left over ghost. I'm New, I'm Natural, I'm the future of product placement in MS software.

      • funny how whenever MS rolls out a new feature, the most common reaction seems to be
        >how do i disable it

        It's also funny later, when Microsoft discontinues said feature, and everybody complains about Microsoft taking away something they were using every day...

        • you know, the only newish feature i ever find myself using regularly is the snipping tool.
          of course they plan to 'move' it in a future update, so here we are.
          (i'm assuming it'll be given a larger feature set, be more cumbersome, etc etc. sometimes when you want a barebones tool, less is more. like notepad.)

    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      Microsoft Please place it next to Cortana and Clippy,so I can keep the useless pieces of your OS together.

      Oh, don't do that. They'll breed.

    • If only you could pipe all three together into a three way chat...

  • by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @10:34AM (#63329873)
    All the more reason to disable that stupid search bar.
    Does anyone know if disabling the web result will kill this? I shudder at the future.
  • by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @10:39AM (#63329885) Homepage
    I don't need that crap. I do useful things with my computer.
    • I don't need that crap. I do useful things with my computer.

      Why? The model is to sit in a chair with muscle atrophy (except for the fingers punching crap into that smart phone, of course), drooling and obeying the command of the 20 advertisements and subliminal marketing sessions being simultaneously displayed. Wait, wasn't there a movie with something like that in it? ;)

  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @10:40AM (#63329889)
    Let them fight in the battle of the AIs. The loser gets banished to the realm where they sent Clippy and Rover.
  • by Schoenlepel ( 1751646 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @10:48AM (#63329911)

    Featurites is not going to help your OS become more lightweight.

    They'd do better to strip Windows of all useless crap and keep it simple and small.

    • Their strategy isn't to be lightweight, it is to compete with BYOD.

      Siri and Google Assistant specifically.

    • They'd do better to strip Windows of all useless crap and keep it simple and small.

      Windows 2000 was simple. Not sure about small. It did everything you asked it to do and nothing else. It never got in your way.
  • by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @11:07AM (#63329959)
    I'm using it at work, where I use Windows 10, but I already set it up as a PWA pinned to my taskbar because I've started using it so much. I get that there's a knee-jerk reaction to hate any change Microsoft makes because so many of them have been dogshit, but I find it hard to complain when the feature is actually useful.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      I get that it's probably an unpopular opinion, but troll mod? Come on. Stop using it as -1 disagree.
  • Soooooo.... how do you turn it off?

  • ...but I'm sure it'll keep some lonely people occupied.

  • Been on Windows 11 for awhile. it is really no different than Windows 10. Not sure I want Bing on the task bar.

    Anyone actually use Bing?
  • So I can get "AI" powered search which will use planet-burning amounts of energy to undoubtedly ultimately be used for the primary purpose of putting targeted ads in my face, right on the task bar, but I can't get a couple checkboxes in options so I can configure my taskbar so that it works like the taskbar has for more than two decades of previous Windows versions

  • Yay clippy is back!

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

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