Microsoft brings Bing Chat, its “copilot for the web,” to Skype and Bing Mobile, where you have the opportunity to add Bing Chat to your group chats and let AI features help you.
Specifically, Bing Chat will be added to the Bing mobile app, where you can dictate or type chat with Bing AI chat on iOS and Android. The same features are available in the mobile version of Microsoft Edge. Finally, you can call Bing (via @Bing) from your friends’ Skype group chats, and ask Bing for recommendations, jokes, advice, and more.
However, you need to sign up for the Bing Chat waitlist to see the new Bing Chat in action, in any app. You can join the waitlist at bing.com/new, where Microsoft will advise you to tweak your browser to Microsoft-approved defaults to make the queue longer.
Microsoft may be proceeding a little slower than expected with the deployment of Bing Chat. Instead of rolling it out to Microsoft Teams first, for example, the feature was added to the relatively underused Teams app. Statista reports that Microsoft Teams will have 270 million daily users by 2022, while Microsoft said on Wednesday that 36 million people worldwide use Skype.
Microsoft
“As we learn and refine this amazing new capability, we envision bringing it to other communication 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 is apparently one key difference: Microsoft’s version of Edge with Bing content allows you to create ideas and summarize documents from the sidebar of the desktop browser. It doesn’t appear that that capability is within Edge, at least not yet. Microsoft is treating both updates to the Edge and Bing apps as “previews,” however, leaving room for future updates.
In a quick hands-on, Bing appears as the same chatbot as on the desktop. Bing’s speech recognition, however, isn’t great. A question, “Where in Hawaii should I visit,” translates to “where to the vet.” Since Bing only allows limited queries per session as well as daily, you can type chats in the mobile app for now.
This story was updated at 10:13 AM with hands-on.