Microsoft’s Bing Chat, a ChatGPT-like chatbot, has been undergoing testing in third-party browsers such as Chrome and Safari for select users. After confirming the feature’s presence in these browsers, Microsoft recently announced that Bing Chat would soon be available on third-party platforms, both on the web and mobile devices.
This move signifies Microsoft’s intention to expand the reach of its AI capabilities beyond its own platforms. Currently, Bing Chat is available on the Bing mobile app and Microsoft Edge web browser. By making it accessible in third-party browsers, Microsoft aims to compete with other browser’s built-in AI tools, like Google’s generative AI search features found in the Google mobile app and Chrome browser.
In its announcement, Microsoft emphasized the value of Bing Chat’s summarized answers and image creation features, highlighting the benefits users can expect across different browsers. However, the company cautioned that the optimal experience would still be achieved using the Microsoft Edge browser. During testing, users noticed some limitations in Chrome, such as a restriction to five messages per conversation instead of the 30 available in Edge, and a character count limit of 2,000 instead of 3,000.
Microsoft also celebrated other recent features, such as multimodal visual search in Bing Chat, allowing users to search using both text and images. This feature was first introduced by Google in 2021, but Bing’s implementation utilizes Open AI to enable users to input images and ask related questions to the chatbot.
Additionally, Microsoft announced Dark Mode for Bing Chat and unveiled Bing Chat Enterprise, which provides commercial data protection for organizations that require strict data security measures. Some businesses have already prohibited the use of consumer applications like ChatGPT due to data protection requirements.
According to Microsoft, Bing Chat has achieved significant milestones to date, with over 1 billion chats and 750 million images processed by the chatbot, along with nine consecutive quarters of growth on Edge.
While an exact launch date for third-party browser support was not provided, Microsoft has assured users that the feature will be arriving soon, expanding the availability and accessibility of Bing Chat’s AI capabilities across different platforms.
