Microsoft’s Bing Chat is coming to non-Microsoft browsers the company confirmed today after various reports of an AI chat bot spotted in other browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari. This expansion will make Microsoft’s ChatGPT-like AI chatbot available to a wider range of users, where previously it was only available to consumers within Microsoft products, such as the Bing mobile app and the Microsoft Edge browser.
The company confirmed the expansion of TechCrunch Bing Chat to other browsers, which has yet to be officially announced.
“We’re accessing Bing Chat in Safari and Chrome to identify users as part of our testing on other browsers,” Microsoft’s director of communications, Caitlin Roulston, said in an emailed statement. “We are excited to expand access to more users once our standard testing procedures are complete.”
According to those who had 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 out Bing AI in Chrome. Otherwise, users can head to Bing.com from their preferred browser, then click the “Chat” icon to try out the experience. However, in our own tests, we can access Bing Chat in Chrome, but not Safari at this time. It might be because we’re not among the “specified users” who were given access during the tests, though.
Image credits: Bing.com screenshot
The ChatGPT-like Bing Chat experience is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, but some have mentioned that testing the AI chatbot in other browsers had more limitations than the original version. For example, the WindowsLatest.com blog, which was the first to spot the expansion, noted that Bing Chat in Chrome only supports 5 messages per conversation, instead of the 30 available in Microsoft Edge. The site said it was also limiting the number of characters to 2,000, instead of the 3,000 that Edge supports.
Microsoft declined to confirm these details or share any other information about the differences between different versions of Bing Chat when we asked for more information. The company also wouldn’t confirm when the expansion to other browsers first began, what platforms are supported, or whether the tests will include users in global markets. That’s for us to find out in the coming days, it seems.
In addition to adding support for Chrome and Safari, Bing Chat appears to be testing a native dark theme as well, but this also isn’t widely available.
Bing Chat is working its way into other Microsoft products after its launch earlier this year. In a matter of weeks, the new Bing arrived in the Bing mobile app, Edge browser for iOS, Android, and desktop, as well as its integration with Skype. This month, Microsoft announced that Bing Chat will also go to the enterprise with a version of Bing Chat that includes business-focused data privacy and governance controls. Along with this announcement, Microsoft also noted that visual search, which allows a chatbot to respond to questions about uploaded images, is also being rolled out.
