Microsoft Ups Bing AI Chatbot Limits, Tests New Feature

Due to popular demand, Microsoft is raising the number of sessions people can have with Bing’s AI-powered chatbot. It also is introducing a new feature: the ability to change the chat’s tone.

Last week, Microsoft imposed a limit of five chats per session and a total of 50 chats per day after its Bing chatbot generated strange and inappropriate responses, including threatening some users. The tech giant argued that conversation length was to blame, saying that long chat sessions can “confuse the underlying chat model.”

Now the limit has been raised to six chat turns per session and 60 total chats per day. Based on Microsoft’s data, this new ceiling should be enough for the “vast majority” of users in their “natural daily use of Bing,” Microsoft said in a blog.

There are plans to raise the daily cap to 100 total chats “soon,” although no timeframe was given.

The tech giant said it will begin testing a new feature that lets users choose the chat’s tone to ‘more precise’ (shorter, more search-focused answers), ‘balanced,’ or ‘more creative’ (longer, chattier answers).

As for the controversial content that was generated in earlier Bing chats, Microsoft said “these long and intricate chat sessions are not something we would typically find with internal testing.”

“The very reason we are testing the new Bing in the open with a limited set of preview testers is precisely to find these atypical use cases from which we can learn and improve the product.”