What you need to know
- Microsoft announced generative AI captions for Bing recently.
- The feature uses artificial intelligence to summarize the contents of a page.
- Those who manage websites can opt out of having Bing use AI generative captions summarize their pages.
When you mention Bing and AI, the first thing that comes to mind is likely Bing Chat. But Microsoft also uses artificial intelligence to improve its Bing search results. The company announced generative AI captions recently, which should help improve how search results appear.
Generative AI captions scan a website and pick out the most important bits of information to create a summary. That resulting summary then appears for that page when it's a search result to a query.
"Harnessing the power of GPT 4, Generative Captions redefine the way searchers interact with search results. By analyzing a search query, it extracts the most pertinent insights from web pages, and skillfully transforms them into highly relevant and easily digestible snippets," explained Microsoft.
"Generative Captions are tailored to each unique search query and may generate different snippets for different queries. Generative captions may not mirror the exact wording on the webpage, but Bing employs a myriad of signals and techniques to guarantee the quality and precision of the generated text."
A benefit of having AI generate captions is that those captions are contextual. Normally, Bing will show a snippet of a webpage with key words highlighted to show relevance. Generative AI captions make a precise summary of the page based on your question.
Those who manage websites can opt out of having Bing generate captions with AI by adding a tag. This is a similar process to controlling if a site gets scanned for information by Bing Chat, and Microsoft has a guide to help developers.
