Microsoft is slowly lifting Bing Chat’s tight turn limits

Microsoft has upped the chat turn limit on its Bing Chat service yet again, now allowing 120 daily turns (10 per session), according to Yusuf Mehdi, consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft. The increase comes on the heels of some unhinged responses Bing Chat generated due to high turn limits its in public debut. This the second time in the past week or so that Microsoft has raised turn limits on Bing Chat.

The brand has been making frequent tweaks to Bing Chat. Most recently, it increased the daily turn limit from 60 turns a day to 100 turns in a major update that rolled out on February 24. When Bing Chat was still in its public preview earlier in February, it supported 50 daily turns, which was quickly bumped up to 60 daily turns due to user interest.

Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of advertising and web services, shared details and answered questions about the tweak to the chatbot on Twitter on Tuesday. He explained that Bing Chat experienced a “regression in its per-session chat limits from eight to six,” while also announcing the new standard of daily turns.

Though Microsoft is now eagerly expanding its chat turn limits, earlier tests of Bing Chat seemed to indicate that shorter sessions were preferable. Several publications that tested out the preview version and the first round of public access to the Microsoft-powered chatbot reported having unusual conversations with Bing Chat, where the AI appeared depressed or unhinged.

Bing Chat is based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is known to have issues with generating information that might be incorrect, misleading, offensive, or biased since it is still in a research phase despite being used by major companies. Microsoft has been investing in OpenAI since 2019 and has committed to collaborating further.

In response to a question on Parakhin’s Twitter thread asking about how much of a document Bing Chat can process, he responded, “Yes, that’s the context length increase I keep talking about. Hope to be able to share more in a week.” This could be a hint that Microsoft has further plans to update Bing Chat.

Bing Chat has been a wildly popular program for Microsoft, with over a million people signing up to join the waitlist in its first 48 hours. However, the AI chatbot was met with some criticism after its public debut due to strange responses, forcing the company to enforce strict conversation limits and deter the bot from answering certain questions.

That hasn’t slowed Microsoft down from adding Bing Chat to more services, though. The company recently rolled out the chatbot to the Windows 11 taskbar, as well as integrated it into Skype. Microsoft is holding a special event on March 16, where we expect to hear about the tech being integrated into Office apps like PowerPoint and Word.

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