If you’ve ever wished your computer could tell you it loves you… and that you don’t love your spouse, then you may be happy to know that Microsoft is bringing its new AI-powered Bing to the Windows 11 Search Box. It’s just one of many new features rolling out today as part of a major Windows 11 update.

Other new features include the ability to pair an iPhone or iPad with your PC to view notifications and respond to messages on your desktop, tabs in the Notepad app, support for new widgets, an updated taskbar that automatically switches to touchscreen or desktop mode on 2-in-1 devices, and more.

It feels strange in 2023 to say that the most interesting update could be related to Microsoft’s Bing search engine. While Bing has long been an afterthought in the search space, it’s the default search tool built into the company’s operating system. I just haven’t really found much reason to use it in the past.

The new Bing uses AI chat functionality developed by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. But while ChatGPT cannot answer questions about anything that happened in the past year or so, Bing can answer questions with up-to-date information that’s even accurate sometimes (it still has a hard time telling fact from fiction and has been known to get belligerent if your chats go on too long).

To be fair, the company has rolled out some changes to Bing’s chatbot functionality that will hopefully make it less likely to threaten to boil your rabbit, but I did find myself getting into an argument with Bing yesterday. I asked it what the major announcements from Mobile World Congress 2023 were and it insisted that one of them was a new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold. I asked Bing if it was sure that model hadn’t been unveiled in 2022 (it had). Bing remained convinced it was announced this week at MWC 2023.

The new AI-powered Bing won’t be available to all Windows 11 users immediately. If you can already use it on the web, then it should be available in your Windows 11 search box after you install the latest update. If you don’t have access, you can join Microsoft’s waitlist.

On the one hand, I’m kind of happy that I’ll be able to ask questions of Bing without manually firing up the Edge web browser (I say “manually,” because once you type a query for Bing into the search box, the result will pop up in an Edge browser window).

On the other hand, given the questionable results I’ve gotten so far, I’m starting to see why people keep getting into arguments with the chatbot. Maybe AI-powered, chat-based search is the future. But I’m not sure it’s the present.

On the other hand, there are a few other new features in the Windows 11 22H2 “Moment” update that I can see myself using, including the ability to use the Windows Snipping Tool to save screen recordings as videos.

You can read more about new features rolling out to Windows 11 in Microsoft’s announcement.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

7 replies on “Windows 11 update brings AI-powered Bing to the Search Box, tabs to Notepad, Phone Link for iOS, and more”

  1. Tabs on notepad is only interesting if you also have the option to turn them off, I avoid Windows now because the Ux makes absolutely no sense unless you use a small touchscreen and its still inferior to Android Ux. The rest of the features are just prodding the user to use Edge, which reminds me of the failed IE everyone went out of their way to delete. Bing as search engine isn’t too terrible, about the same garbage as Google search. Neither are really that good. Google used to be a fairly awesome search engine that was once capable of finding needles in a haystacks but is now just an annoying ad serving machine. This Windows 11 update is still less functional than Windows 7.

    1. They put tabs in notepad for the same reason they put them in file explorer: there’s no longer any way to ungroup open windows on the taskbar.

    2. I’ve been using tabbed text editors on Linux for 20+ years. They’re great. You can see all of your workspaces right above the main editor, making them much more obvious than it they’re in the bottom taskbar.

    3. I hate the forcing of people to use their pc / device in a certain approved way. People that want grouped tabs should have that annoying feature. But people who don’t want them shouldn’t be forced into using them or even workspaces if they choose not to. There should always be more than one option to use your Ux. It reminds me of how Gnome loves to ignores third party extensions such as desktop icons by refusing to include them by default.

      1. I don’t know how Notepad will work, but in most open source text editors tabs are optional. Even when you can’t turn off the tab bar you can always choose to open new editors in separate windows rather than new tabs.

  2. But that’s not my computer telling me it loves me, that’s someone else’s distributed blob of virtual machines running on a gazillion servers with Tesla cards telling me stuff. In fact I don’t think you could get it to tell you it loves you if you tried, it’ll probably flat out refuse.
    If I really wanted my computer to tell me that, I would use some software that you can download and install on your computer right now but I doubt I’m allowed to recommend because it was written by people who didn’t like AI lecturing them about how to feel. It just requires a lot of vram (12gb is recommended).

    1. |_0L, so true! welcome to the newly improved digital rape economy!

Comments are closed.