Microsoft wasn’t subtle in announcing its plans to add AI functionality to any and all of its existing products. On Monday, the company announced that, in addition to its availability on the Edge mobile browser, as well as standalone Android and iOS apps, Microsoft’s Bing Chat AI chatbot will now be accessible through third-party browsers like Safari and Chrome.
The news comes as part of Microsoft’s six-month commemoration of Bing Chat’s public availability. The company also notes that in that time, users have engaged in more than a billion conversations with the AI and have had it generate three-quarters of a billion images.
“This next step in the journey allows Bing to showcase the incredible value of summarized answers, image creation and more, to a broader array of people,” the company release reads. Features like “longer conversations [and] chat history” remain Edge mobile exclusives, however.
Microsoft began opening access to Bing Chat in late July, when it became available on 3rd-party desktop browsers. That version is limited as well, offering only 2,000 words per prompt on Chrome and Safari versus 4,000 on Edge.
Bing Chat is powered by ChatGPT-4 from OpenAI but offers more up-to-date information than the system its built on, thanks to Bing Chat’s access to Bing Search, which allows it access to information on events that have happened since the model was trained. In addition to the third-party browser access, the newest version of Bing Chat will also offer multimodal search, meaning users will be able to upload a photo and have the AI answer specific questions about its contents, as well as a dark mode for after-hours AI queries.
Source: Engadget
