More ads are coming to Microsoft’s new Bing AI chatbot

 

Microsoft’s helpful Bing AI chatbot will be getting more ads, the company recently announced in a blog post, which was penned by corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi. In a statement to The Verge, Caitlin Roulston, the company’s director of communications, clarified that the “ads will show in the new Bing, specifically in chat (as they do in traditional search results).”

Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot will be getting more ads according to a recent blog post by corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi. The ads will show in the new Bing specifically in chat as they do in traditional search results. Caitlin Roulston, the company’s director of communications clarified this in a statement to The Verge. The placement of these ads is logical and the smaller boxes aren’t too intrusive. They’re basically linked citations. Microsoft has been using ads in Bing since February but now plans to embed these ads within Bing’s chat box responses. The monetization of the AI assistant makes sense as far as running a business goes but how it will impact the user experience remains to be seen. Fingers crossed!

What is Bing AI chatbot?

Bing Chat is a full-fledged AI chatbot that can do many things like generating text like an essay or writing poems, writing code, asking complex questions and holding a conversation with follow-up questions. You can interact with Bing Chat on Microsoft Edge by clicking the Bing (discovery) button in the top-right corner and then clicking the Chat tab. Bing Chat indexes the entirety of the web to generate answers to your questions.

An expanded hover experience where hovering over a link from a publisher will display more links from that publisher giving the user more ways to engage and driving more traffic to the publisher’s website.

 As you can see in the screenshot below, there are a number of tiny Ad boxes in the most relevant spots. These boxes will link back to Bing, of course. The placement is logical and the smaller boxes aren’t too intrusive, so hopefully it won’t be too much of a nuisance. They’re basically linked citations.

This news isn’t too surprising, as Microsoft has been using ads in Bing since February. However, the ads pop up as inside shopping results or sponsored links. Now Microsoft plans to embed these ads within Bing’s chat box responses. My only concern is the amount of ads Microsoft plans on incorporating. I’m not a fan of ads in general, especially if it’s a deluge of them. I’m easily aggravated by the constant ad breaks on Hulu, for example, as they constantly disrupt the flow of the show I’m watching. If I’m ever going to use Bing chatbot, I don’t want it to disrupt the experience for me.

Monetizing Bing chatbot makes sense as far as running a business goes, but how will it impact the user experience? I knew the monetization of the AI assistant would come sooner or later, especially with Bing amassing over 100 million daily active users. Microsoft is looking for a way to make money with its GPT-4-powered Bing AI chatbot and this is how its going to do it. Hopefully, the intuitive user experience will remain