Microsoft brings its AI-powered Bing chatbot to a sidebar in its Edge web browser

Fresh off OpenAI's release of GPT-4 and Google's own AI announcements, Microsoft has announced further Bing integration into its products.

On Tuesday, Microsoft began rolling out an update to its Chromium-based Microsoft Edge web browser which brings its AI-powered Bing chatbot to the application via a sidebar.

What does this mean? Basically, users can surf the web in Microsoft Edge and have an easily accessible AI chatbot directly to the right of the webpage at all times. Users can ask the chatbot questions directly related to the webpage they are currently on or request it perform tasks related to the page. 

For example, a user can ask the chatbot to summarize the details of the web page that's currently open or generate a shopping list based on the items a user is viewing on a website.

The feature was previously available on developer versions of Microsoft Edge but is now available to all users on both Windows and Mac. After updating the Edge application, users can activate the AI chatbot sidebar by clicking on the Bing logo in the upper right hand side of the browser window.

This might not be the most groundbreaking AI-related news story this week as Edge accounts for only around 4.2 percent of the total web browser market share worldwide. But, it's a big move from Microsoft. It basically allows an AI chatbot to follow users around as they surf the web. And it's a big statement from the company too in terms of its commitment to push forward with AI-powered technology.