Microsoft announces Reddit partnership, new AI features for Bing

By Dan Thorp-Lancaster
last updated

The front page of the internet is coming to Bing with a new push for AI-powered search features.

Speaking at today's Everyday AI event, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian announced a new partnership with Microsoft. Through the partnership, Reddit and Microsoft will leverage AI tools to integrate Reddit content in searches, including answers from one of the platform's signature draws, Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions.

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In a new post on the Bing blog, Microsoft explains that the new Reddit integration is part of a new AI-powered Intelligent Search feature for Bing. The feature is intended to make interacting with Bing more natural, Microsoft says, by more quickly surfacing answers to your questions with comprehensive information. Essentially, this boils down to a mix of neural network magic to verify answers and surface more information from multiple sources on the initial search page.

As part of Intelligent Search, Microsoft's partnership with Reddit will let it leverage the community of millions in a few different ways, at least initially. From Microsoft:

  • While already in Bing, when you search for a specific Reddit topic or subreddit, like "Reddit Aww", Bing will surface a sneak peak of the topic with the top conversations for the day from Reddit.
  • When searching for a general topic that is best answered with relevant Reddit conversations, Bing will surface a snippet of those conversations at the top of the page so you can easily get perspectives from the millions of Reddit users.
  • Bing will be the place to go to search for Reddit AMAs, Q&As with celebrities and every day heroes hosted by the Reddit community. On Bing you can discover AMA schedules and see snapshots of AMAs that have already been completed. Simply search a person's name to see their AMA snapshot or search for "Reddit AMAs" to see a carousel of popular AMAs.

Other Bing enhancements announced today include a more interactive conventional search experience to help you narrow down what you're looking for, as well as a more intelligent image search. The conventional search improvements will use conversational AI to help provide better answers based on past searches. Users can also clarify questions with topic options to refine your search. The image search enhancements, on the other hand, use object recognition to help you search within images or surface interesting information about landmarks or objects in photos.

These new features are rolling out now in the U.S., Microsoft says, with other markets to come in the future. You can learn more about Intelligent Search at Microsoft (opens in new tab).

Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. 

8 Comments
  • SAIN
  • In one way, it's a pretty cool concept. Your search engine being more like a friend who knows stuff and you can simply ask them rather then hunting for the correct keywords and thought process that somethings need inorder to find them now in a search engine.
    On the other hand, for those of us who don't need that friend... it's going to be like asking your one of the apple stores to recommend you a microsoft surface tablet. You'll get something that runs Windows, but it won't what you actually wanted.
  • Typical US only, I hope we don't have to wait several years before people outside of the US get to use this feature.
  • Instead they could fix their search engine to give better results. Or add a domain filtering. 🤔
  • There is support to filter by domain.
  • Reddit will sure be brimming with Windows/Microsoft LOVE when they hear about this.
  • So that's why reddit has started harvesting my data.
  • with other markets to come in the future ... sigh ... I'm tired, Microsoft.