Microsoft Edge now has a Bing AI chatbot sidebar

Microsoft is now rolling out its Bing AI-powered chatbot in a sidebar inside its Edge browser. The Bing sidebar was initially only available in dev versions of Edge, but it’s now rolling out to stable versions of Microsoft Edge on both Windows and macOS.

The new sidebar appears as a big Bing button at the top left of Edge, and hovering over or clicking on it will activate the new Bing chatbot experience. If you’re a member of the Bing preview, you can use the chat function to ask the chatbot questions or the compose option to generate text for emails, blog posts, letters, and much more.

As the sidebar is based on the context of the page you’re viewing in Edge, you can do things like ask the chatbot to summarize information on a shopping site if you’re viewing a product. The Bing sidebar can also summarize articles, compare items on a webpage, and let you pick from a variety of tones to generate text in blog posts, emails, bulleted lists, and more.

This new Bing sidebar in Edge hints at where Microsoft could go with its AI features for Windows, Office, and elsewhere. Google just announced its own plans to add ChatGPT-like AI to Gmail and Google Docs, allowing Google Workspace users to automatically generate emails, documents, and more.

Microsoft is expected to unveil similar features at an AI for work event on Thursday. The event will likely focus on how Microsoft’s ChatGPT-like AI will work in Office apps like Teams, Word, and Outlook. Microsoft launched a similar new generative Copilot AI experience in Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Viva Sales earlier this month, which uses the Azure OpenAI Service to automatically create sales emails.