Microsoft announced Friday that it will end users' conversations with a chatbot on a new version of its Bing search engine after it was found to behave strangely during long conversations.
The American technology giant announced a new version of Bing at a special event last week, as well as a new version of its artificial intelligence-powered Edge web browser, and updated it to be available to a wide range of users.
After the company launched its new search engine, Bing, the search engine was widely criticized for being perceived as offensive, misleading, and manipulative.
The software maker realized that very long chat sessions could disrupt the language model on which the new Bing is based, and to address these issues, it decided to make some changes to keep chat sessions focused.
Starting today, the chat experience will be capped at 50 sessions per day with five roles per session, Microsoft said in a blog post. The company interprets the roles here as each question and answer between the user and the chatbot.
According to data from Microsoft, the vast majority of users found the answers they were looking for in all five people, and only about 1% of chat sessions contained more than 50 messages.
She added that when a chat session reaches five rounds, users will be asked to start a new thread. At the end of each chat session, the context must be cleared so that the bot does not get confused. To do this, users simply click on the broom icon to the left of the search field to start a new conversation.
Microsoft is still working on refining Bing's new approach, but it's unclear how long these restrictions on chatbots will last.
At a time when Microsoft is trying to fix the new Bing, Reuters reported on Friday that the company has entered talks with advertising agencies regarding a plan to invest in the search engine in an attempt to undermine its competitor Google in the search engine market.