Microsoft’s Bing is gaining a number of AI improvements, including support for OpenAI’s new DALLE-E 3 model, more personalized answers in search and chat, and tools that will watermark images as being AI-generated. The company announced these and other Windows and Bing news at an event this week in New York, where it also introduced new Surface devices that include built-in AI experiences.

The company noted that this Windows 11 update will introduce a range of AI enhancements. That includes adding its AI assistant Copilot starting September 26, which will then be rolled out across Bing, Edge and Microsoft 365 Copilot this fall. The latter will be available to enterprise customers on November 1, 2023, in tandem with the release of Microsoft 365 Chat, a new AI assistant for the workplace. AI experiences are also coming to Windows apps like Paint, Photos, Clipchamp and so on.

But in addition to the Windows releases, the company was also introducing a slew of AI enhancements to its search engine Bing - including, notably, the addition of the DALL-E 3 model from OpenAI. The company had first introduced the image creator DALL-E to Bing back in March of this year - allowing consumers to generate images within its Bing Chat. At the time, the company did not say which version of DALL-E it was using beyond noting it was the "very latest" model.

Now, though, Microsoft says it will upgrade the integration to DALL-E 3, which promises better renderings for details like fingers, eyes and shadows.

It's furthering its promises around responsible image generation, too: the system previously had guardrails preventing the generation of harmful or unsafe images. With the new release, it will also add invisible digital watermarks to all AI-generated images — something it calls Content Credentials. This technology incorporates cryptographic methods and standards by "Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)" to add more transparency about the AI images. Adobe, Intel, Sony, and more have also joined C2PA.

Now Bing will also offer more personal answers of your search queries through your previous chats with Bing Chat.

Explains Microsoft, “if you’ve used Bing Chat to learn more about your favorite movies, books, or music, future conversations and searches will take those interests into account when providing answers.” The company notes that this system is opt-out, so users will be able to turn it off if they’d rather their chat history not inform their results.

For example, the company comments that if you have used Bing previously to search for a favorite sports team, next time that you are planning a trip, Bing can tell whether your team is playing in your destination city.

Microsoft says the feature would improve search results, as many people end up doing dozens of searches on a single topic — and that, in fact, more than 60% of those searches are spent tweaking the original query. But those searches aren’t as useful as they could be because they don’t include personalized context, like what you’ve searched for previously or what you’re researching across the web now.

Additionally, the company said it is bringing support for multimodal Visual Search and Image Creator to Bing Chat Enterprise to its more than 160 million Microsoft 365 users, who already have access to the workplace AI chatbot.