A Timeline of Bing and Bard Features

The concept of the personal data assistant popped up over the years such as the much maligned but forward-thinking handwriting recognizing Apple Newton in 1993 and the first popularly successful PDA, the US Robotics PalmPilot in 1997, paving the way for today’s AI-hardware equipped smartphones. It’s the “T” in GPT, and has made new machine learning output considerably more compelling than Clippy or Tay, with the simple trick of predicting what’s statistically most likely to be typed next—a profoundly deeper thing than it seems at first glance. For the general public to get this early access, they had to use the Edge browser, run an .exe to change your defaults to Microsoft’s requirements, scan a QR code and download the mobile Bing app. What’s more, with every new website you visit first hitting you with the GDPR cookie prompt, then with ads, and with Google’s Rich Snippets and Quick Answers already teaching us to alternatives to clicking through, the practical use of this new back-and-forth conversational style to search feels like a no brainer. Again, according to Bing: …leaving us to conclude, after calculating Apple out of the equation, that only about 1 in 8, or 12.5% of desktop users don’t go through the trouble of replacing the default Windows browser with Chrome, which I speculate is still a residual effect of the non-standard and now retired Internet Explorer.