We believe the future of search will be more conversational, instead of the traditional query to document approach that searchers have become accustomed to. While having a conversation with your search engine may still be years away, chatbots can be a great way to get your questions answered and today we're making Bing even more powerful by adding relevant chatbots to your search results.

Find chatbots for Skype, Facebook Messenger and more

Bing is now the best place to find bots across multiple messaging platforms. Just run a search such as 'travel bots' and you can add relevant bots directly from the Bing search results page to your favorite messaging platform including Skype, Facebook Messenger, Slack and Telegram.

Plan dinner out

Chatbots on Bing can help you plan a dinner out. Starting in Seattle, now when you search on Bing, many of your favorite restaurants have bots that you can chat with to learn things such as if the restaurant has vegetarian or gluten-free options, where you can park and if they accept certain credit cards. This information is often not readily available or difficult to find on restaurant websites. In the coming months, we will be expanding this program to more US metropolitan areas.

Coming soon!

At Microsoft Build 2017 we demonstrated additional bot innovations that are currently being tested with our users. We expect these bots to be broadly available in the near future.

Learn something new

The Bing team is applying cutting edge AI techniques to solve problems in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) and conversational understanding at web scale. Built on Bot Framework, Bing InfoBot applies deep learning techniques to Bing’s knowledge of the web to automatically build chatbots from existing web content. This means you can converse with an InfoBot to get answers to your questions from any web site. For example, you can chat with the Bing InfoBot to get answers from sites like Wikipedia as you can see in the screenshot below. Bing InfoBot will enable us to “botify” the web without site owners needing to do custom development, which will move search towards a more conversational model at scale. Bing InfoBot is currently being evaluated with a small group of users on multiple domains including wikipedia.com, webmd.com, stackoverflow.com, allrecipes.com and more.

Build your own bot for Bing

If you are a developer, you can build your own chatbot for Bing. Just build your bot using Microsoft Bot Framework and then publish your bot to the Bing channel. After your bot has been reviewed and approved, users can discover and chat with your bot in their Bing search results. We showed bots from several partners integrated in Bing at Build. To learn more about developing bots for Bing, check out the Microsoft Bot Framework documentation and the blog post about the Bot Framework announcements at Build 2017.

Happy chatting!

- The Bing Team