Earlier today in San Francisco, Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft AI & Research, demonstrated how Microsoft is infusing intelligent technologies across our core products to make artificial intelligence (AI) available to everyone, with the simple goal of helping people deliver their best work.

Bing trails far behind Google Inc.in the search engine market, sitting at less than 6 percent to Google's 81 percent.

In addition to the new Bing search capabilities, Microsoft said that it will increasingly offer artificial intelligence tools in its Office 365 product, enabling users to find text located within slides and images, hunt down the meaning of acronyms, pull up relevant docs without leaving the current one, find action items in emails, and more.

With the rise of fake news and misinformation, one of Bing's main changes is being smarter about the information it displays and becoming more conversational and nuanced. The features are created to give users answers faster, provide them more comprehensive and complete information, and enable them to interact with the search engine more naturally.

Microsoft has bunged a load of AI-powered features into its software - from Azure and Office 365 to Bing and Cortana. Other new features added to the app include audible light detector. Microsoft also highlighted a new commitment of $50 million over the next five years to grow AI for Earth programme.

Microsoft's Bing search engine and Cortana digital assistant might not change that much from day to day, but behind the scenes they're getting smarter by integrating factual insights from more sources, including the opinions of Reddit users.

To ensure users are comfortable with the search results they receive from Bing, the search engine will now show multiple perspectives and multiple sources, culled from a list of preapproved news sources. For questions that have multiple answers, Bing will present the information in a carousel.

"If you use Bing or Google nowadays you recognize that more and more often you'll see direct answers on the top of search result pages", said, who leads Microsoft's 8,000-person research and AI division. "It's no longer 10 blue links".

These new features will be rolling out over coming days and weeks. The company said that the application can now use computer vision to recognise more complex characters and even spot colours. It will do this by adding prompts to extract more information from the users.

Android users will also be able to run Cortana as a launcher soon, both on its own and in a partnership deal with Cheetah Mobile.

Microsoft also plans to push what it calls 'skills chaining, ' where if Cortana is used to book tickets to an event, the assistant will encourage you to add it to your Calendar, too. So Microsoft's working to have Cortanado it and either summarise or surface the e-mails - from both Outlook and Gmail - that might be most important to you.