The company is also using AI to power a new price-matching service and to summarize reviews for consumer products on Bing Chat.
In a bid to improve the e-commerce experience on Bing, Microsoft will use AI to create shopping guides tailored to users’ interests.
The new “Buying Guides” feature is among three Bing enhancements Microsoft announced today. The goal is to simplify the online shopping experience at a time when Redmond has already embraced OpenAI’s ChatGPT tech for Bing, Windows, and Microsoft Office programs.
In a blog post(Opens in a new window), Redmond said it’s applying the Buying Guide feature starting today to back-to-school shopping for college students. A customized buying guide will appear if you type the words “college supplies” into the Bing search engine.
Once the search is made, Microsoft says: “Your shopping assistant for the web will do the research for you, using AI to generate a tailored Buying Guide that tells you what to look for in each category, offers product suggestions, and shows the specifications of multiple, similar items next to each other in a smart compare table, so you can quickly compare options without having to click around to various websites.”
Microsoft also briefly previewed the feature in a video. As you can see, it’ll surface the buying guide at the top of search results. Clicking it will then open a page, showing the various recommended product categories. You can then view the pros and cons for various products, along with links to third-party retailers selling the gear.
Users can expect buying guides for various popular and topical categories with more added over time, according to Microsoft. Examples include buying guides for electronics, Father’s Day, camping essentials and back to school sales for K-12.
To help you pick out the right product model, Microsoft is also rolling out another feature that can summarize the top reviews and user comments about any item you’re looking to purchase. The review summaries feature will appear when you open Bing Chat in the Edge sidebar.
For example, if you search for headphones, review summaries suggest you consider sound quality, fit, and device compatibility when buying. “And when you find a specific pair you like, you can ask Bing Chat in Edge to briefly summarize what people are saying about it online,” Microsoft says.
The final enhancement involves price matching. If you buy a product and its price drops at a different retailer, Microsoft Bing can automatically notify you about it and help you request a price match, thus saving you money. “We’ve partnered with top US retailers with existing price match policies and will be adding more over time,” the company says.
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The price-matching function promises to roll out soon and will join Bing’s existing price history and price comparison monitoring services.
Microsoft developed the features, saying online shopping has become overwhelming. “There is simply too much to choose from, places to look, and information to sort through,” the company says. However, the same features could deprive traffic to third-party websites behind the reviews and buying guides —the same data that Bing Chat uses to create its results.
To create the new features, Microsoft tapped OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, along with Bing’s search index, the company added.
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