Technologies

Microsoft’s New AI-Powered Bing: Here Are 5 Things You’ll Be Able to Do

Bing will refine search results, summarize topics and generate writing as your «co-pilot.»

Microsoft on Tuesday announced an enhanced Bing, detailing how it’s using the AI tech behind ChatGPT to add in a slew of new capabilities to the longtime second-place search engine. There’s a waiting list for the service now, and Microsoft says it will be available broadly in the coming months. There’ll be no charge for the service.

CEO Satya Nadella said the juiced-up search service aims to take on queries that aren’t getting good results on today’s search engines. People increasingly use search engines to get advice and information on complex topics, not just a link to a website, and the AI boost to Bing aims to make it more usable.

«It’s a new day in search,» Nadella said during the event on Tuesday.

ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot from a company called OpenAI, burst onto the scene in November with a breathtaking capacity for drawing information from the web and presenting it in plausible essays, poems and other formats. It set off an intense interest in AI that has captured the attention of millions, including the Big Tech players. Last month, Microsoft said it would be investing billions of dollars into the company. Meanwhile, Google, the dominant search engine on the web, on Tuesday announced Bard, its ChatGPT challenger.

Microsoft says its technology makes Bing your co-pilot on the web. Here’s a taste of what you can try out with the AI-powered search.

Search

You can search on Bing.com, as always. What’s new here is that Microsoft has applied OpenAI’s model to its search ranking engine. That led to a huge leap in the relevance of search results, the company says, so Microsoft believes you’ll find better responses to your basic searches on Bing.

The AI also augments the search results with written summaries. A use case Microsoft predicts will be popular is planning a trip. If you’re going to New Orleans for three days, for example, what should you do? A search on Bing will show you not just links to sites with sight-seeing and museum suggestions for the Big Easy, but also a sidebar with a summary of information from around the web, written by AI. The sidebar will link to sources that can let you explore further.

Ask for more details

If you want to ask more questions after your initial Bing search, you can click the chat icon near the top of the search page. Here you can refine the results. In the trip planning example, you can do things like clarify that you’re visiting New Orleans with kids, or ask for a three-day itinerary for your visit.

Bing can offer pretty fine-grained results in this conversational format. In addition to a detailed itinerary with descriptions of the places you’ll visit, you can ask for travel times between activities in New Orleans, for example.

This also applies to searching for advice on a home improvement project, like installing air conditioning in your house. If you clarify that you have air ducts in your home already, for example, it can give you information more relevant to your project.

Write something

The new Bing can write for you. After you research your home improvement project, for example, you ask Bing to write an email to your partner summarizing what you found. You can edit the writing, click into the text box of a new email and have Bing insert it there.

You can also ask Bing to write something with a fresh prompt, similar to many examples of ChatGPT’s writing that users have shared online recently. Anything from the whimsical «write a story about a curious dog who goes to the moon for preschoolers» to the more serious «write a letter to my apartment contesting an upcoming increase in rent» can generate text. You can also tweak the tone of the writing, like requesting it be funny.

Get context for a website

On the newly revamped Edge browser, you’ll be able to open a Bing sidebar and get more information about something you’re looking at online. You can open a product listing on Amazon, for example, and then open up the sidebar to ask Bing to tell you about the product. It’ll give you a summary of the product’s specs, cost and use cases.

For a specific iRobot vacuum, for example, you can also ask Bing for examples of reviews from cat owners. That’ll pull up quotes from Amazon reviews for the vacuum that mention cats and some summary from Bing.

You can also ask Bing to give you the key takeaways from a long document, and then compare it to another document.

Ask a broad question

If you’ve ever typed a query like «who are some famous Mexican painters?» into a search engine, you’re probably familiar with the experience of getting an excerpt from one website, a list of relevant people and a link to Wikipedia. The request is so broad that you typically have to leave the search page to get the answer. The new Bing wants you to stay, at least for a while.

Ask about Mexican painters on the new Bing and you’ll get a written summary of the key players and a description of their work. You can click on links to sources to learn more, if you like, or you can ask for more fine-grained results in the chat function.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see this post.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for May 18, #707

Hints and answers for Connections for May 18, #707.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Connections puzzle is a mix of difficult and easy. The purple category does what most purple categories do, and makes you really break down how you think about the words. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group, to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: School days.

Green group hint: About there!

Blue group hint: Sure, let’s go.

Purple group hint: The Scarlett Letter.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Tasks for a student.

Green group: Encouraging responses in a guessing game.

Blue group: Up for anything.

Purple group: What «A» might mean.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is tasks for a student. The four answers are assignment, drill, exercise and lesson.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is encouraging responses in a guessing game. The four answers are almost, close, not quite and warm.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is up for anything. The four answers are easy, flexible, game and open.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is what «A» might mean. The four answers are area, athletic, excellent and one.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for May 18, #441

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle No. 441 for May 18.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands will probably be easier if you have some basic knowledge about a certain type of vessel. You don’t really need to have ever been on one, since the answers show up in books and movies all the time. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Riding the wind.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: famed song by Christopher Cross.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints, but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

DULL, TILE, TILER, SEER, GALE, GALES, HAIL, SAIL, LEEK, GLUE, HALL, TALL, HEAT

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you’ve got all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

HELM, HULL, KEEL, MAST, STERN, RIGGING, RUDDER, TILLER

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is SAILBOAT. To find it, start with the S that’s four letters down on the farthest row to the left, then wind across, up and down.

Technologies

Google I/O 2025: How to Watch and What to Expect

With Android 16 out of the way, Google I/O will certainly be all about AI.

Google I/O 2025 takes place on May 20 and 21 with Google’s big keynote happening on day 1. We expect Big G to talk about its myriad innovations across its ever-expanding portfolio of products — almost certainly with a huge focus on AI every step of the way. If we collectively cross our fingers, promise to be good and eat all our vegetables then we may even be treated to a sneak peek at upcoming hardware.

Read more: Android 16: Everything Google Announced at the Android Show

Google also hosted a totally separate event that focused solely on Android. The Android Show: I/O Edition saw the wrappers come off Android 16, with insights into the new Material 3 Expressive interface, updates to security and a focus on Gemini and how it’ll work on a variety of other devices.

By breaking out Android news into its own virtual event, Google frees itself to spend more time during the I/O keynote to talk about Gemini, Deep Mind, Android XR and Project Astra. It’s going to be a jam-packed event, so here’s how you can watch I/O 2025 as it happens and what you can look forward to.

Google I/O: Where to watch

Google I/O proper kicks off with a keynote taking place on May 20, 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT, 6 p.m. BST). It’ll almost certainly be available to stream online on Google’s own YouTube channel, although a holding video is yet to be available. There’s no live link on the I/O website yet, either, though you can use the handy links to add the event to your calendar of choice. Expect links to a livestream to be available closer to the day.

What to expect from Google I/O 2025

Little chat about Android 16: As Google gave Android 16 its own outing already, it’s likely that it won’t be mentioned all that much during I/O. In fact at last year’s event, Android was barely mentioned, while uses of the term «AI» went well over a hundred.

Android XR: Google didn’t talk much about Android XR during the Android show, focusing instead on the purely phone-based updates to the platform. We expected to hear more about the company’s latest foray into mixed-reality headsets in partnership with Samsung and its Project Moohan headset, so it’s possible that this is being saved for I/O proper.

Gemini: With Android being spun out into its own separate event, Google is evidently clearing the way for I/O to focus on everything else the company does. AI will continue to dominate the conversation at I/O, just as it did last year (though hopefully Google can make it more understandable) with updates to many of its AI platforms expected to be announced.

Gemini is expected to receive a variety of update announcements, including more information on its latest 2.5 Pro update which boasts various improvements to its reasoning abilities, and in particular to its helpfulness for coding applications. Expect lots of mentions of Google’s other AI-based products, too, including DeepMind, LearnLM and Project Astra. Let’s just hope Google has figured out how to make this information make any kind of sense.

Beyond AI, Google may talk about updates to its other products including GMail, Chrome and the Play Store, although whether these updates are big enough to be discussed during the keynote rather than as part of the developer-focused sessions following I/O’s opening remains to be seen.