Bing Chat is now available to everyone through Microsoft's Edge browser and Bing smartphone app, with no waiting list. Microsoft is also expanding what the chatbot can do, adding features that link its answers to webpages, media and services. Together, the changes suggest a broader role for chat as a way to navigate the web and act on what a user finds.
From access to a fuller chat experience
The chatbot uses a free variant of GPT-4 combined with Microsoft's Turing language models. The wider rollout removes the waiting list that previously stood between users and Bing Chat, while a set of interface updates gives people more ways to continue using it.
Responses can include images and video, and users can revisit earlier conversations through a chat history similar to ChatGPT's. Microsoft is also improving Bing Chat's integration with Edge, placing the assistant alongside the pages people are viewing.
That setup matters when a question depends on the contents of a particular webpage. With what Microsoft calls “persistent chat,” the chatbot remains available in a sidebar after someone moves from chat to a webpage, where it can answer questions about that page. The conversation can therefore continue alongside browsing instead of ending when the user opens a site.
Plugins connect conversation with services
Bing Actions point to a further step: using chat to trigger an action through a connected service. Microsoft says the bot can make a restaurant reservation directly in the chat interface. If it recommends a video, it can also launch the appropriate video service.
These abilities are linked to plugins, which connect the chatbot with outside services. Microsoft is partnering with OpenTable for restaurant reservations and Apple TV for video streaming. Wolfram Alpha is a partner for visualizations, while OpenAI is included for developer access.
At the time described in the source, Microsoft expected to announce more partners before Actions and Plugins launched in a few weeks. Those features extend the chatbot's role beyond generating a response: they create a path from asking for something to using a service that can help provide it.
Chat as a way to use the web
Microsoft's stated ambition is to make chat a “co-pilot for the web.” Images, video, persistent access in Edge and service connections all support that direction. Rather than treating the chatbot as a separate destination, the company is placing it beside browsing and building ways for it to help with tasks people currently perform on websites.
If this approach succeeds, chat could take over more of those tasks. A user might move from asking a question to exploring a webpage, then to using a connected service, with the chatbot present throughout. That possibility could change how people reach and interact with online content, and in turn affect the web's content ecosystem.
The shift also raises a practical question about the chatbot's place in that ecosystem. When an assistant can answer questions about a page and connect people to services, it becomes an intermediary between users, websites and the tools they want to use. The source presents this as a potential change, rather than an outcome that has already happened.
A wider race to build AI assistants
Microsoft's rollout is part of a broader push to bring more capabilities into chatbots. OpenAI is also widening the rollout of browsing and coding plugins for ChatGPT. Google is working on Bard and planned to unveil new features at its own I/O 2023 developer conference next week.
The services described take different steps toward a similar idea: chat can be a place to find information and connect it with other capabilities. Bing Chat's combination of page-aware conversation, plugins and actions shows how Microsoft is trying to make that idea part of browsing itself. Whether it changes how people use the web depends on how successful that approach becomes.