Microsoft share price is up about 5% on the stock market after announcing a subscription to artificial intelligence tools for Microsoft 365 users. The U.S. company will charge $30 per month to employ its artificial intelligence assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot, with tools such as Teams, Excel and Word.
Microsoft has also announced the expansion of its search engine, Bing, through Bing Chat Enterprise, a chat with artificial intelligence technology for work environments. This new tool is based, according to the company, “on web data” that allows to provide complete and verifiable answers, “protecting the commercial data” used. For the time being it will be free, although the company will charge five dollars per month, without specifying a specific date.
The third announcement made by the company is the implementation in Bing of ‘Visual Search in Chat’, a new feature that will allow searching for information in the search engine by uploading images. It will be possible to obtain information such as understanding the context of an image, interpreting it or answering questions related to the image.
The introduction of these new features by Microsoft is part of a battle between the major technology companies for the dominance of generative artificial intelligence. Following the success of ChatGPT, last March Google launched Bard, a conversational system applied to its search engine that facilitates user searches.