ChatGPT, the Artificial Intelligence-powered chatbot, continues to evolve and is now being equipped with a web search feature that should make it even more powerful. The new feature, known as “Browse with Bing” has officially been released from beta, making it a full internet browsing feature for ChatGPT.
Until now, the search feature was limited to dates through September 2021, which hampered its effectiveness as a real-time search engine. OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT, began integrating Internet services in March to improve the chatbot’s functionality.
Bing Web Search was implemented in May, followed by an enhanced integration in the ChatGPT mobile app in late June. However, after the chatbot began displaying paid web content, the feature was withdrawn. In the months that followed, OpenAI refined the “Browse with Bing” feature so that it respects what content website owners allow for access in their robots.txt file. Now “Browse with Bing” is available again for all Plus and Enterprise subscribers.
In a related move, OpenAI also recently moved the upgrade to Dall-E 3 to beta. This version of the text-to-image generator is integrated with ChatGPT to simplify text prompts for image generation. An added benefit of this integration is that users can now receive images as part of their text-based requests without having to switch apps.
The recent upgrades point to OpenAI’s overarching strategic approach to transform ChatGPT from a purely text-based generator into a universal chatbot that integrates other media. With that in mind, OpenAI last month added the ability to have verbal conversations to ChatGPT. In the future, ChatGPT will also allow users to integrate images into their search queries.
The recent changes underscore OpenAI’s commitment to establishing ChatGPT as a fully integrated, multimedia, generative, real-time search engine. The constant evolution and improvement of ChatGPT’s features makes the AI-driven chatbot an increasingly powerful tool for users. It will be exciting to see how these combined media and real-time search functions will prove themselves in practice.
