Bing Chat Now Comes To Microsoft Edge Sidebar

Microsoft Edge has a shortcut button for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bing Chat. (photo: doc. Microsoft)

JAKARTA - Microsoft Edge now has a shortcut button in the sidebar for the Bing Chat Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chatbot. Initially, it was only available on the dev version of Edge, but now it is rolling out to the stable version of the browser.

The new sidebar appears as a large Bing button at the top left of Edge. When the user hovers over or clicks, it activates the new Bing Chat experience.

Bing preview members, can use the chat function to ask questions to the chatbot or explore the compose options that can generate text.

The composing feature can be useful for many others, such as composing captions for social media posts, LinkedIn updates, meeting agendas, website authoring, and more.

Because the sidebar is based on the context of the page the user is viewing in Edge, they can ask the chatbot to summarize information on the shopping site if they're viewing a product.

The Bing sidebar can also summarize articles, compare items on web pages, and users can choose from a variety of tones to create text in blog entries, emails, bulleted lists, and more.

By adding the new Bing in Edge's sidebar it hints at where Microsoft could put its AI features for Windows, Office, and elsewhere.

Rival Google also just announced its own plans to add ChatGPT-like AI to Gmail and Google Docs, where Google Workspace users can automatically create emails, documents, and more.

Launching The Verge, Wednesday, March 15, Microsoft is expected to unveil a similar feature at an AI event that will focus on how ChatGPT-like AI will work in Office applications such as Teams, Word, and Outlook, this week.

For your information, Microsoft also rolled out a new, similar generative AI Copilot experience in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Viva Sales earlier this month, which uses the Azure OpenAI Service to automatically generate sales emails.