Microsoft now lets you change Bing’s chatbot personality to be more entertaining

Microsoft has added a new feature to its Bing chatbot that lets you toggle between different tones for responses. There are three options for the AI-powered chatbot’s responses: creative, balanced, and precise. The creative mode includes responses that are “original and imaginative,” whereas the precise mode favors accuracy and relevancy for more factual and concise answers.

Microsoft has set the default for the Bing chatbot to the balanced mode, which it hopes will strike a balance between accuracy and creativity. These new chat modes are rolling out to all Bing AI users right now, and around 90 percent of users should be seeing them already.

The new modes should help counter the wild outbursts we originally saw with the Bing AI chatbot. Microsoft was quick to add some tight restrictions to Bing AI after plenty of rude responses made the rounds on Twitter and Reddit, and the software maker has been loosening those restrictions in recent days.

Some of these restrictions made Bing chat feel a little unresponsive, where the chatbot would simply refuse to answer many questions it confidently answered before Microsoft took action. Microsoft has fixed most of the unresponsive problems, thanks to a new update that was applied to its Bing chat service earlier this week.

The update includes a “significant reduction in cases where Bing refuses to reply for no apparent reason,” according to Mikhail Parakhin, the head of web services at Microsoft. It should also mean “reduced instances of hallucination in answers,” so hopefully the Bing chatbot produces less wild responses.