LAGOS, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) – Microsoft has unveiled a pair of fresh features designed to enhance search capabilities tailored for educational users; Bing Chat Enterprise and Search Progress.
Bing Chat Enterprise stands as a preview feature targeted at faculty users of Microsoft 365 A3 and A5. This feature enables these educators, staff members, and researchers to engage in conversations with an AI-powered assistant.
Unlike Bing Chat, which is accessible to anyone on the web, Bing Chat Enterprise is exclusively available to Microsoft 365 education users and mandates a sign-in using a Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory).
The primary objective behind Bing Chat Enterprise is to streamline various tasks for education professionals.
It employs generative AI to assist with tasks like content writing, rewriting, improvement, and optimization.
This can be utilized for tasks such as drafting content, summarizing PDFs in Edge, content creation, and brainstorming. Notably, Bing Chat Enterprise comes with robust commercial data protection measures.
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This ensures that both user and chat data remain confidential and are not accessed, saved, or utilized by Microsoft or any other entity.
For access, faculty users can either use bing.com/chat or the Microsoft Edge sidebar. IT administrators licensed for Microsoft 365 A3 or A5 have the authority to enable or disable the feature for their faculty members.
By default, the feature will be turned on for eligible users starting no earlier than September 21.
However, it’s important to note that this feature is exclusively designed for faculty members, while students can continue using the standard version of Bing Chat on Edge.
Moving on to the Search Progress feature, it caters to both students and educators with the aim of refining the search experience, particularly for educational purposes.
Serving as a learning accelerator, Search Progress closely monitors a student’s search behavior and furnishes feedback on how they can enhance their information literacy skills.
Microsoft defines information literacy as the ability to effectively and ethically locate, evaluate, and utilize information.
Search Progress bolsters this skill by demonstrating techniques to students for refining search queries, filtering results, citing sources, and avoiding plagiarism.
Search Progress is available to all Microsoft 365 education users and can be accessed via bing.com/education or the Microsoft Edge sidebar.
This feature holds the potential to empower students in developing stronger research and information handling abilities.