What you need to know
- Microsoft just shipped Bing Chat to Google Chrome.
- The company promises to add support for the tool to more desktop and mobile browsers in the future.
- Users can now access Bing Chat Enterprise on Edge Mobile as well.
Microsoft recently celebrated Bing Chat's six-month anniversary, citing numerous wins since its debut, including multimodal visual search in chat, third-party browser support, Bing Image Creator, and Bing hitting 100 million daily active users.
But perhaps, the major enhancement was shipping the tool to open preview, ultimately allowing more people to access the tool minus the Microsoft account requirement.
Still, the chatbot has been limited to Microsoft Edge, except for extensions that let users access Bing Chat on third-party browsers. It has been a long wait for users who've anticipated the availability of Bing Chat on third-party browsers.
Last month, Microsoft started sending invites to Chrome users to use the new Bing when browsing. However, Chrome users couldn't fully leverage the tool's capabilities despite enabling the extension and setting Bing as the default search engine. Features such as Chat mode remained limited to users with access to the new Bing.
Now, Microsoft officially announced the availability of its AI-powered chatbot in Chrome via its weekly release notes, which highlight the changes implemented in Bing Chat.
We reported that the tool was shipping to Google Chrome and Safari in July, but the company has since issued official communication. Microsoft indicated that there are plans underway to add support for the tool in other browsers on desktop and mobile.
Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise are now supported in the Chrome desktop browser (using the latest Stable Channel update) for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Support for other browsers on desktop and mobile is forthcoming.
Microsoft
Other changes highlighted by the company in the release notes include:
- Bing Chat Enterprise on Edge Mobile
- New Bing search page templates
- Expanded access to Bing Chat on Swiftkey
Bing Chat's expanded support on third-party browsers
It's quite evident that Microsoft intends to ship support for Bing Chat across multiple third-party browsers to enhance its accessibility. The company has been transparent about this since announcing the new Bing.
While Bing has garnered attention, a new report indicates that Bing's market share is stagnant and hasn't changed much since January.
Microsoft has refuted the claims and indicated that the statistics don't directly reflect the actual figures. The company has yet to provide a detailed account of how well the chatbot is doing but has indicated that its "usage signals show strong growth since February and because of new access points like Bing Chat Enterprise.
The company added that its "experienced one of [its] biggest growth months on record since [it] launched [its] new Bing and Edge experience" and that "customers have engaged in over a billion chats and have created over 750 million images with Bing Image Creator."
It will be interesting to see the impact Bing's expanded support for third-party browsers has on these numbers.
