'Major' news: Microsoft slips Bing chatbot shortcut into Windows 11

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to foist upon us its controversial OpenAI-powered chat-driven Bing search bot. Redmond last month rolled out a preview of its Bing chatbot to much hype and criticism. With the latest updates to Windows 11 this week, Microsoft is partially building it into the year-old operating system, …

[Ball boy]

Anyone been asked if they want this 'feature'?

I imagine, because it's integrated into the bar, that people will use it out of laziness (beats opening a browser, waiting for it to load then typing in the same query). Redmond will then take the usage data and declare it to be a roaring success because, well, look at the number of users.

[Mayday]

Re: Anyone been asked if they want this 'feature'?

How long have you been using MS products for?

[David 132]

Re: Anyone been asked if they want this 'feature'?

Oh, goody, was my reaction. Now, when I try to search for a local file or launch a program by name, instead of just getting Web Results for: Q2-Budget-Draft.doc or whatever, I'll get an AI-generated response as well.

"How does Q2-Budget-Draft.doc make you feel?"

Dammit, Eliza Bing.

[43300]

Re: Anyone been asked if they want this 'feature'?

Of course not! Microsoft knows best and will foist whatever shit they like on Windows users, whenever they feel like it!

[Primus Secundus Tertius]

Minutes taking

As someone who has minuted many meetings, I have dreamed of the day when a computer will listen to a meeting, and then five minutes after the meeting ends it will email a set of minutes to those who attended. The test will be how many objections will be raised to those minutes.

[Nifty]

Re: Minutes taking

Automatic speech to transcript is already routine, so it'll be a small step. The real issue will be, happy to share your meetings with Bing chat?

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Minutes taking

>Automatic speech to transcript is already routine,

But this is AI, so it's automatic speech transcription by somebody with a CTE

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The real issue will be, happy to share your meetings with Bing chat?

The real issue will be, you can do fuckall about it.

[Primus Secundus Tertius]

Re: Minutes taking

A literal transcript of a conversation is very different from a set of minutes. The minutes have to reduce a wandering babble to an apparently logical discussion, with decisions and actions clearly indicated. So real intelligence is needed, from a human or otherwise.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

But the only question ever asked of Bing on Edge

Is "where do I download chrome?"

[ITS Retired]

Re: But the only question ever asked of Bing on Edge

Or Linux? When was the last time Microsoft ask their users what they wanted? Or listened to them?

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Re: But the only question ever asked of Bing on Edge

When was the last time Microsoft ask their users what they wanted? Or listened to them?

That's a trick question, right?

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

Oh goodie. One more thing to disable / uninstall.

[43300]

If you can! One of my jobs over the past few months has been preparing the Intune profiles for a Windows 11 roll-out. The result is a convoluted and rather messy collection of app store uninstall rules, directly-applied powershell scripts, and powershell check / remediate scripts (those are in a completely illogical place in Intune). Of course, the things which every single business IT department is going to want to do - such as removing that fake-Teams chat thing - have no specific controls so have to be done using powershell.

Got it mostly how I want it, but there are a few things which I've not worked out how to do - that chatbot thing might be another of those as it looks like it's incorporated directly into the start menu search function, so unless there's a powershell option to disable it then it could be one of those 'tough shit' things which MIcrosoft imposes on us fairly often.

[druck]

Just made for each other

A buggy unreliable operating system and a nonsense spewing AI search bot, couldn't really go together any better.

[Howard Sway]

First question

"What have Microsoft executives been accused of relating to alleged anti-competetive practices by the company over the past 20 years?"

Should be an entertaining read, given the amount of training material available on the web.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry Microsoft I dont use EDGE, and I certiantly DONT want his near my Systems....

Another invasive push by Microsoft whis has NOT been asked for yest is being force fed to users.

[that one in the corner]

You always thought every meeting was the same as the last

> AI-generated notes to deliver key points from a meeting

Aka regurgitating material from its training set and history of past meetings without any understanding or context:

"After delivering via Skype a short eulogy for ex-Chairman Horace, Director of IT Horace presented the costings for the company-wide network upgrade to Token Ring and then introduced Horace, the manager of the newly-formed Electronic Computation Department, who provided the Board with an overview of the incoming ICL Automatic Card Tabulation Machine and welcomed to the company Horace, who will be Overseer of the ladies on the third floor and is charged with hiring two new computers to fill the shoes of Elsie who is leaving on the eve of her wedding."

> intelligent recap, a feature that uses AI to suggest action items and who's responsible for them

"Action item 3: IT will provision all staff with a Zune"

"Action item 7: Doctor Forbin will install the new Interface between Colossus and Proteus"

What could possibly go wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

That pretty much confirms my opinion ..

.. that ChatGPT is mostly just a shiny toy to distract people from the abysmal quality and security of their products, a situation that adding something that is only barely useful to anyone but marketing is not exactly going to improve either as it's more code that can go wrong or offer as yet unexpected backdoors.

But boy oh boy, will it splash and sparkle at boardroom presentations where it will allow them to gently skip over the exposure to hacking and ransomware their products still bring*, prior to taking everyone on that overly expensive dinner..

* _{They are the one common factor between the veritable mass of breaches and successful ramsomware attacks over the last decade or so..}

[goodjudge]

Sometimes it helps to be an IT dinosaur

with a home PC, not a laptop, where the camera and mic are only plugged in for making occasional calls to friends abroad then unplugged again straight after.

[wsm]

No! Stop! Help!

Saying any of those things to Microsoft is like talking to the proverbial brick wall. Hopefully, Regedit.exe will fix these new features too.

[Mostly Irrelevant]

They still haven't demonstrated any reason we need a "Search" button in Windows in the first place. You can search from the start menu, making the "Search" menu a worse start menu with more ads makes no sense.