From Search to Discovery: How Bing AI Could Change the Way We Find Information

Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines. The problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to the scripts with a digital workspace inner workings.

Heather Bicknell 0:29
This is random, but I have been meaning to tell you that I finished Star Trek Deep Space Nine. So I watched a full season of Star Trek. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 0:40
What are your thoughts?

Heather Bicknell 0:42
I really liked it. The just a lot of great memorable episodes and writing and directing. So now I'm on to next generation, which watching the first season of next generation after watching the spacetimes is a little bit like, you know, it was filmed before so as I'm sure you know, so it's a little it's a little rough, because after coming off the end of the Space Nine, but I'm invested, I guess.

Ryan Purvis 1:14
Yeah, it's a bit it's a bit weird to watch it that way. But I mean, I watch them, like our loops. So like, I'm looping through enterprise again. And it's just nice to have them on, like while I'm working in the background, and you don't have to worry too much about what's what's going on in the storyline. Because, you know, you've you've already watched the series a few times, though, so it's all fine. But I it's just the writing so good. And in a lot of ways, the things that I like about these these series events, but in enterprises, you know, obviously top of mine because that's what I'm watching a lot of what they write about a lot of the writers what they did is they've they've made it, like related to real time, real issues in the world at the time. That's probably why I liked the series so much because it can't it always relates to stuff that's going on in the world.

Heather Bicknell 2:11
They do ask like real moral questions and sort of explore that a lot. So

Ryan Purvis 2:19
I think that was Roddenberry's thing. Because if you don't if you remember the history of it, but basically Star Trek was already what was the first TV show to have a woman of colour on the on the as a main actress. And then obviously, through various various seasons, you've had, you know, more modern things like gay relationships. And if you watch the latest one, which is discovery, you know, there's a gay relationship on it, which, which is a big step, you know, so these are good things, because that's that's real life. I mean, that's what we were expecting out of out of shows. The show more more consistent what's actually happening.

Heather Bicknell 3:01
Yeah, especially one set the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Star Trek. Who knew?

Ryan Purvis 3:12
Well,it's funny, because I've been watching a lot of series while I've been working. And I think, you know, I was watching Halo, for example, which is also really good. If you haven't watched it yet. And what I'm enjoying about them, is it's besides being an escapism for real life, it's, it's almost playing with some of these ideas, you know, in a TV format, where they can explore some of the solutions to these ideas as well. If that makes any sense.

Heather Bicknell 3:41
Yeah, yeah, I think it does. Okay, it's interesting TV.

Ryan Purvis 3:46
So we've gone down a science fiction route.

Heather Bicknell 3:51
Sorry, I started it, I was thinking we could chat about being AI. Microsoft is obviously making a bunch of different moves to incorporate open AI, chat GPT technology into their, into their software. So one of the latest versions of that is a new, new version of Bing, which is fascinating, right? Because Bing has always been the sort of joke of a search engine, you know, compared to Google never really got a lot of traction. It's just kind of always been, yeah, the butt of the joke. But now it's getting a tonne of attention because it's InCorp. They're they've released you know, some beta version. Only for edge browsers right now on windows, new version of Chromium edge. And you have to like opt in it's not like he can't just go and look at it now but eventually it will be rolling out wider. But where they've actually incorporated the engine of that AI intelligence right in Like surfacing like helping you like summarise content on a page and having a separate chat where you can work things through. And there's a few different ways that manifests but I was just reading their, their blog on it today for the Microsoft site and listen to the language that they use to talk about this moment. Like they're hyping it up as like, like this is revolutionary, right, which maybe, you know, we can talk about, we can talk about that. But this is the opening of their blog, to empower people to unlock the joy of discovery, feel the wonder of creation, and better harness the world's knowledge. Today, we're improving how the world benefits from the web by reinventing the tools billions of people use every day, the search engine and the browser. Hmm. That's pretty bold language. So there. Yeah,

Ryan Purvis 5:52
yeah, I must admit, I'm never a fan of bolshy language. But other than in movies, which should be. And I mean, as much as being makes money through Microsoft, I don't know many people that actually use Bing. So forcing someone to use it is a tricky word. For me personally. And specifically, when you lock it into a browser, I think that's also a little bit of an issue. But I think reality is it is the next step in some respects, because if you are going search, whether it's DuckDuckGo, or Google or Bing, there's just so much noise to go through it to go through in your results. So having something that can filter it and make it sensible, makes sense. But I don't think it's an earth shattering move. I just think it's a natural integration.

Heather Bicknell 6:55
I think where I see the greatest impact is really not so much on the experience, like yes, on the experience, of course. But we sort of, you know, there's lots and lots of people trying out a similar experience today by just using chat GPT, experimenting with open AI technologies. Obviously, when you're plugging that into real time web stuff, the experience gets different and what you can do with it gets different, but I, I wonder what it's going to how it's gonna transform the web. Because if people, you know, if the experience takes off, this becomes the default search experience. What does that mean for the websites that are actually the ones holding all of this content? Right? Because Google's had something for a while called featured snippets that you've, you know, we probably see right is when you're doing a search result, and Google just pulls the information out of the websites, or even you know, the commonly asked questions, right? Google's done a few things to make it so that you don't need to actually go into websites to access content. But of course, a lot of websites are run on ads, or they obviously want you to actually go to their site to learn more. So, you know, this is sort of an even more souped up version of that, right? Not needed to actually go into a website. So actually have a bit of a prediction. A hot take, but I think this is going to be good for websites that aren't about content, but are about action. Right? Imagine like, you are, well, for certain websites anyway, you're planning a trip with the help of being AI. And it's bringing in links to here's where you book your hotel, here's where you book, your flight, you know, any site that's about action is still going to get surfaced, and you're still need to get, you know, going to need to go there and do your transaction. Right. But if it's the content, like here, you know, are the famous historical places to visit in Paris? Any website that would have held that content before? Is that a disadvantage? I don't know. Different content, but

Ryan Purvis 9:04
well, well. Well, I was gonna say, I think I think the thing that needs to change and it's definitely a frustration that I have, we're just talking about booking a holiday now is, you know, the biggest frustration of booking anything is trying to trying to plan it with knowing what what to do. And I'm not just talking about well, you're going to be in Egypt for a week and then go into permits. What what you really want is some intelligence to know that like if we're gonna travel somewhere, it's two adults, two kids. We're gonna fly from explication on land and explication. We want to do you know, because you got kids we want to kid friendly things. So you don't want to spend hours and hours and hours looking at you know which hotels to go to which which flights to take what's scenic things to see etc, etc, what you want to do is say, we want to go to Egypt for a week here, the dates, come back with the information for me. And that could be a list of links, with recommendations that they've already done the checks. And I think this comes to your action and your content points where, you know, they'll say stay at this hotel, because this hotel is going to go to kids club, and lots of activity for the kids. And it's, you know, TripAdvisor gives it a five out of five. And here are the three top comments, you know, in the most in the last month, or confirming power got to this hypothesis needed a flight you should take this is the amount of luggage you should carry with you, these are the kind of this is the weather at this time of year. So all that contextual stuff that you don't like stuff you would think of and stuff you wouldn't think of, like, who thinks about checking the weather for the period of time you going? Because usually what you do is you think, Oh, we're gonna go and summer. So it should be hot day. But you might go to summer there. And some of these actually might be rainy season. Or hot there is 40 degrees, not 20 degrees, which is what you're used to, you know, and it's only it's integrated. The obviously, yeah, so I think that would be impressive. And you know, I've, I've set up a little, I've paid for the API foot for Chet GDP. But I've set a very low limit. And I've actually set up a little loop in notion where I will post a post my questions to check GDP now, through notion with some boundaries, you know, respond, you know, so for example, I say, forehead, this is bullets for this is a table format as a normal response, who's the who's the persona that chatting needs to be? When asked the question, and he wants my question. And then then I just wait five minutes for the answer. Because I found going to the site and trying to get it was just a bit painful. And that that's helping me to formalise my questions better. And I didn't go to Google anymore. Now, one of the biggest problems with just chatted up, if you if you listen to a lot of people is that they don't need it, the data is accurate, because it's just a system prompt engine. But I think most of stuff that I get back is actually pretty useful, as left to to interrogate it into to put the some, what's the word sanity to it, it's a so that I agree with what they're saying. But it cuts down my workload, because I can ask a whole bunch of questions are gonna do my work? And I come back and I got five minutes, I got a couple of answers to things that I'd have to research. The next step to that was I can just go and ask more questions to what I've read and get more answers. And I'm not even going near Google. I'm just talking through through an agent through a text conversation in a very loose way. I mean, the next step is obviously to have a whatsapp channel or, or something like that, or telegram channel to talk to, to the agent. And I think that's probably where search needs to go. It needs to go away from going to a browser and searching, typing a question there. I think it needs to move to do more interactive channel.

Heather Bicknell 13:02
Yeah, I mean, that's what the I think that's part of the big AI experience, right, is having that that chat panel, basically bringing that right to the web. So yeah, it'll be interesting. Something to keep a watch on and talking about for sure, but unfortunately, they need to wrap up here. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 13:23
That's exactly cool. We will chat next week.

Heather Bicknell 13:26
Okay. You too. Bye.

Ryan Purvis 13:31
Thank you for listening to today's episode. And the big news, our producer, editor. Thank you, Heather. For your hardware from this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DWW podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www.digitalworkspace.works that works. Please also visit our www.digitalworkspace.works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.