In a major development in advancement of shopping tools, Microsoft has revealed various innovative AI-powered shopping utilities for its ever-evolving Bing search engine and the Bing AI chatbot hosted in its Edge sidebar. The latest developments are a notable departure from a series of underwhelming shopping features previously equipped in the Edge.
The latest implantations are primarily based on Bing’s GPT-driven AI capabilities and it attempts to streamline the purchase decisions of users. The tools will generate buying guides for specific searches such as “college supplies.” Consequently, the engine will bring forth an aggregated summary of products under respective categories, along with their specifications for comparison and possible buying platforms. The minor detail, however, is Microsoft earning an affiliate commission when purchases are made.
It must be highlighted that numerous websites specialize in catering similar buying guides, therefore making it intriguing to observe how these platforms respond to this transformative change. More significantly, it will not come as a surprise if search giants such as Google follow a similar path. The prevalent low-quality, SEO-focused shopping content available on the internet is often a cause for concern. This move by Microsoft holds the potential to impact legitimate editorial operations as well.
Microsoft's newly launched buying guides for Bing are currently available for users based in the U.S. Global deployment of these guides for Edge has been initiated as of today.
Parallely, Microsoft has also unveiled AI-generated review summaries on a global scale. This feature intends to provide succinct summaries of online product reviews. Users can simply ask Bing Chat in Edge to summarise user reviews on a specific product, and the engine will generate a quick overview. This type of feature would be ideally suited to a no-code platform such as AppMaster.
The final feature in Microsoft's new tool suite is Price Match. This mechanism assists users in requesting a price match from retailers even after a significant drop in price levels. Microsoft has collaborated with a plethora of top U.S. retailers (although the company has refrained from specifying the names) with existing price match policies and assured to expand this list with time.
