Microsoft released its new version of Bing to a limited number of people on Tuesday. Each user will be able to run a limited number of queries and people can join a wait list for access to the full version of the service. The company plans to expand to millions more people by the end of the month.

Other companies are jumping into the chatbot race. On Monday, Google announced that it would soon offer a chatbot called Bard and start adding chatbot technology into its own search engine. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is fast-tracking efforts to release similar technology in various products. And countless start-ups are building their own generative A.I. products, the name for technologies that generate words, images and other media on their own.

Executives, entrepreneurs and investors hope the chatbots will not turn out to be what the tech industry has seemed to churn out for some time now: a curiosity that falls short of big expectations.

There have been many: Self-driving cars that can’t quite get the self-driving part right. Wearable technologies that still need a smartphone nearby to truly be useful. And crypto currencies that promised to change the world of finance but so far have largely been an asset for speculators.

Microsoft has worked closely with OpenAI, invested $13 billion in the start-up and supplied the billions of dollars in computing power needed to build its A.I. technology. Microsoft declined to discuss the specific technology that underpins its new search engine, but it is likely based on a widely rumored OpenAI creation called GPT-4, the successor to what the San Francisco company released two months ago.

“Satya played his hand beautifully,” said Andrew Ng, a researcher and entrepreneur who previously oversaw the A.I. labs at both Google and Chinese giant Baidu.

Like similar services from start-ups like Perplexity and You.com, Microsoft’s new search engine annotates what the chatbot says, so people can readily review its sources. And it dovetails with Microsoft’s index of all websites, so that it can instantly access the latest information posted to the internet. The company also said that its search engine includes technology that is designed to identify and remove problematic content from the chat service.