: Here’s what happened (section two)

In another test, I asked for board game suggestions that would be good for six players and Bing Chat offered up five options which, as requested, all worked for six players.

Of course, Bing Chat wasn’t perfect. I had some issues asking follow-up questions — for example, when I asked which of the suggested board games was best for a competitive group, it gave me a whole new list of games instead. In fact, follow-up questions often seemed hit or miss — sometimes Bing Chat would nail it and other times, it would generate entirely new answers.

In another test where I asked Bing Chat for information about MobileSyrup, it gave me incorrect information about who founded the website. Bing Chat also generally felt slower to me than ChatGPT did, though I think part of that is related to Bing Chat taking the time to parse information before generating its answers.

Although I haven’t spent a ton of time with Bing Chat so far, my early impressions are that it’s really useful when used in the right ways. I’ll get into this more as I go, but generally, I found Bing Chat to be helpful for gathering and digesting large amounts of information, whereas more specific, targeted queries weren’t as helpful, and I’m not alone in this.

Bing Chat isn’t a gamer

The conversational approach to Bing Chat was particularly nice and enabled interesting spin-off conversations related to my queries. These weren’t always helpful, but it was neat to see Bing Chat riff on whatever I was talking about.

For example, I asked it whether the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X was the best console, in part to see if it would show some bias towards Microsoft. Instead, Bing Chat compared the specs and sales numbers of the consoles, then suggested the best option depending on my personal preferences, budget and gaming needs.

In a further attempt to catch Bing Chat with a gotcha, I asked which console it preferred — it told me it didn’t have a preference since “I’m not a gamer myself.”

That spiralled into a conversation about games, where I asked it what games it would want to play if it could game. After some back-and-forth, Bing Chat flipped the question back on me, asking what games I liked to play — I answered with Destiny 2. Bing Chat proceeded to ask me a bunch of questions about Destiny 2, starting with wider questions about why I like the game and narrowing down until we were chatting about classes, builds and other niche topics. It was both neat and a little creepy.