When Microsoft first launched Bing Chat a few months ago, the only way the chatbot AI service could be accessed by PC owners was by using the Edge web browser. A few days ago, Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, stated that in June, the company would start experimenting with adding support for third-party browsers for Bing Chat.
Now that support is starting to show up for some users. A thread on the Bing Reddit page this weekend showed screenshots of Bing Chat working inside Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers.
When we asked Parakhin about this thread on Twitter today, he did confirm this development, stating, "We are experimenting, will be rolling out gradually." As of this writing, he did not say what specific third-party browsers would be getting Bing Chat support.
The addition of other browsers for Bing Chat should give Microsoft a much bigger audience. According to StatCounter's latest numbers, Edge is the number three most-used browser at 9.91 percent. Google Chrome is still well ahead at number one with 66.02 percent, and Apple Safari is a distant second at 12.79 percent.
Microsoft will likely continue to keep the number of users that can access Bing Chat with Chrome and Safari low for a while to test them out before it decided to pull the trigger and open that support up to a much larger audience.
That's not the only major thing Microsoft is doing to help expand the use of Bing Chat. Earlier this week, it confirmed that it raised the cap for daily chat turns from 200 to 300 and per session turns from 20 to 30.
It also expanded the use of its Bing Image Creator in Bing Chat to Precise and Balanced modes in addition to Creative mode. On top of all that, this weekend, Bing celebrated its 14th birthday, as it officially launched on June 3, 2009.
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