Microsoft is bringing Bing Chat, its “copilot for the web,” to Skype and Bing Mobile, where you’ll have a chance to add Bing Chat to your group chats and let its AI features help you out.
Specifically, Bing Chat will be added to the Bing mobile app, where you’ll be able to orally dictate or type a chat to the Bing AI chat on both iOS and Android. The same features will be available on the mobile version of Microsoft Edge. Finally, you’ll be able to invoke Bing (via @Bing) from Skype group chats with your friends, and ask Bing for recommendations, jokes, advice, and so on.
However, you’ll still need to sign up for the Bing Chat waitlist to see the new Bing Chat in action, in whatever app. You can join the waitlist at bing.com/new, where Microsoft will advise you to tweak your browser to the Microsoft-approved defaults to move higher up the queue.
Microsoft may be proceeding a bit slower than expected with its Bing Chat deployment. Instead of rolling it out first to Microsoft Teams, for example, the feature is being added to the somewhat-less-utilized Teams app. Statista reported that Microsoft Teams had 270 million daily users as of 2022, while Microsoft said Wednesday that 36 million people around the world use Skype.
“As we learn and fine-tune this amazing new capability, we envision bringing it to other communications apps, like Teams, in the future,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
While Microsoft appears to be making Bing available to mobile users with the same capabilities (and limitations) as the desktop application, there’s apparently one key difference: Microsoft’s version of Edge with Bing inside allows you to craft ideas and summarize documents from the sidebar in the desktop browser. It doesn’t appear that that capability is within Edge, at least not yet. Microsoft is treating both the updates to the Edge and Bing apps as “previews,” however, leaving room for future updates.
In a quick hands-on, Bing appeared to be the same chatbot as on the desktop. Bing’s speech recognition, however, was abysmal. A query, “Where in Hawaii should I visit,” was interpreted as “where at the vet.” Since Bing only allows limited queries per session as well as daily, you may want to type chats into the mobile app for now.
This story was updated at 10:13 AM with a hands-on.
Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld
Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers' News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.