Bing Chat breaks free of Edge — big June update may bring AI chatbot to Chrome
It feels like Bing Chat just got a major update at Microsoft Build. But it looks like the Microsoft chatbot powered by ChatGPT is getting another update in June — and it could bring my favorite feature yet.
According to Neowin, Bing Chat is getting an update sometime in June that could bring a variety of upgrades. This is based on tweets from Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, Mikhail Parakhin. When asked by Neowin for further details, Parakhin stated that Bing Chat will be able to handle larger conversations in Balanced mode and improvements for Bing Image Creator.
But for me, the big headline is the last thing Parakhin mentioned, which is “hopefully first experiments in enabling third-party browsers.”
In addition, larger context size for Balanced, big improvements in disengagement rate (especially for code writing), improvements in Bing Image Creator, hopefully first experiments in enabling third party browsers.May 30, 2023
The biggest knock against Bing Chat — aside from sometimes hallucinating — is that you can only use the popular chatbot in Microsoft’s Edge browser. Well, aside from the Bing mobile app, your Swiftkey keyboard and a multitude of other integrations. But if you wanted to use it on a web browser, you had to use Edge.
Now though, Edge’s reign of terror may finally come to an end, and that’s a big win for anyone looking to try Bing Chat. As someone who uses Google Chrome constantly, I find myself using ChatGPT more often than Bing’s ChatGPT alternative. But if I can use it in Chrome, I may find myself picking it over ChatGPT or even Google Search, though it has its own AI upgrade coming soon.
Parakhin did not specify which third-party browsers will get support first, and the way he uses “hopefully” means that this feature could ultimately miss out on the June update. But I think I speak for Chrome, Firefox and Safari users everywhere when I say this update can’t come soon enough.
Recent Bing Chat updates: What’s new
As we mentioned earlier, Bing with ChatGPT got a handful of upgrades at Microsoft Build 2023. In fact, Bing is now in ChatGPT, allowing ChatGPT Plus users to search the web directly from ChatGPT.
But the biggest change was the open plugin standard for ChatGPT and Bing Chat, which opens up both chatbots to a number of third-party plugins to supercharge the AIs. Bing Chat will also be integrated into Windows Copilot for Windows 11 to help you get things done on your Windows PC.
So it’s not a surprise that Microsoft would finally open up Bing Chat to Chrome and other browsers given that it’s made Bing Chat able to be integrated into just about everything else. In fact, you can even get it as a Chat widget on your iPhone or Android phone for even easier access on mobile.
If you haven’t tried out Bing Chat yet, now is a great time to give it a go. The waitlist is gone and the chatbot is now available to everyone, so check out our guide to using Bing with ChatGPT and get started today.
