Microsoft’s AI chatbot, Bing Chat, is coming to non-Microsoft browsers, the company confirmed today following various reports of the AI chatbot being spotted in other browsers like Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari. The expansion will make Microsoft’s ChatGPT-like AI chatbot available to a broader set of users, as it was previously available to consumers only within Microsoft products, like the Bing mobile app and Microsoft Edge browser.
The company confirmed to TechCrunch that Bing Chat is expanding to other browsers, which hadn’t yet been officially announced.
“We are flighting access to Bing Chat in Safari and Chrome to select users as part of our testing on other browsers,” said Microsoft director of communications, Caitlin Roulston, in an emailed statement. “We are excited to expand access to even more users once our standard testing procedures are complete.”
According to those who gained access to the Bing AI chatbot on Windows, they received a pop-up in the Windows 10 or 11 taskbar, offering the opportunity to try the Bing AI in Chrome. Otherwise, users can head to Bing.com from their preferred browser, then click on the “Chat” icon to try out the experience. In our own tests, however, we could access Bing Chat in Chrome, but not Safari at this time. That could be because we’re not among the “select users” who were gaining access during the tests.
Bing Chat’s ChatGPT-like experience is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, but some have reported that testing the AI chatbot in other browsers had more limitations than with the original version. For example, the blog WindowsLatest.com, which was the first to spot the expansion, noted that Bing Chat in Chrome supports only five messages per conversation, instead of the 30 available in Microsoft Edge. It was also limiting the character count to 2,000, instead of the 3,000 supported by Edge, the site said.
Microsoft declined to confirm these details or share any further information about the differences between the various versions of Bing Chat when we asked for more information. The company also wouldn’t confirm when the expansion to other browsers first began, which platforms were supported, or whether the tests would include users in global markets. That’s for us to discover in the days ahead, apparently.
In addition to adding support for Chrome and Safari, Bing Chat appears to be testing a native dark theme, too, but this is also not yet broadly available.
Bing Chat has been working its way into other Microsoft products following its launch earlier this year. In a matter of weeks, the new Bing arrived in the Bing mobile app and Edge browser for iOS, Android, and the desktop, in addition to being integrated with Skype. This month, Microsoft announced Bing Chat would also head into the enterprise with a version of Bing Chat that included business-focused data privacy and governance controls. Alongside that announcement, Microsoft also noted Visual Search, which lets the chatbot respond to questions about uploaded images, was rolling out, too.
Source @TechCrunch
