By
Bena Ilyas
May 10th, 2024
Now, the chatbot can again produce results from the browser and provide internet links to the current-day world in order to back up its findings with internet sources.
OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT‘s feature “Browse with Bing” is back, after the company shut it down in July as a result of accessing paywalled content. Now, users can get live web results in response to their inquiries that come from ChatGPT browsing the internet.
Currently, the feature is available only to Plus and Enterprise subscribers. In the near future, OpenAI is planning to expand it to all users.
Web browsing feature was first introduced back in May this year, however, soon after the release, OpenAI found out that the feature could bypass restrictions to display content on websites protected by paywalls. When asked to display the full text of specific URLs, it could return despite the information being part of premium subscriptions. As a result, OpenAI decided to temporarily shut down the service until a solution would be found.
Users of the feature were not happy with the news and took to OpenAI’s forums to complain. Some of them said they only paid for ChatGPT Plus for access to the Bing web search feature.
Previously, the chatbot’s knowledge base was limited to information obtained prior to September 2021.
Now, the chatbot can again produce results from the browser and provide internet links to the current-day world in order to back up its findings with internet sources.
OpenAI explained:
“Since the original launch of browsing in May, we received useful feedback. Updates include following robots.txt and identifying user agents so sites can control how ChatGPT interacts with them. Browsing is particularly useful for tasks that require up-to-date information, such as helping you with technical research, trying to choose a bike, or planning a vacation.”
To try the feature, Plus users have to open the settings, select ‘Beta features’, and toggle on ‘Browse with Bing’.
Other ChatGPT Updates
Apart from reintroducing browsing the web feature, OpenAI has announced a few other updates to ChatGPT. Among them are new voice and image capabilities. In particular, users can now use their voice to engage in a back-and-forth conversation with the chatbot, it does not matter which environment they are in at the moment of the inquiry.
Further, ChatGPT now supports a limited selection of languages in its interface – Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
Recently, we have also reported about ChatGPT releasing DALL-E 3, the latest version of the text-to-image tool that uses ChatGPT to help create prompts. Users can tweak their prompts – descriptions of images they want to be generated – through conversations with ChatGPT. Starting in October, ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Enterprise clients will be granted access to DALL-E via the API.