Microsoft Bing announced Monday that it soon will begin to support AI-powered Bing in third-party browsers on web and mobile.

The company, which estimates that today it supports more than 1 billion chats, in late July confirmed that Bing Chat was testing in third-party browsers like Chrome and Safari for select users.

The move puts the AI chatbot in direct competition with other browser’s built-in tools, such as Google’s generative AI search features that have become available in the Google mobile app and Chrome browser. 

This next step in the journey allows Bing to showcase the incredible value of summarized answers, image creation and more, to a broader array of people,” Microsoft wrote in the announcement. “You’ll get most of the great benefits of Bing and we’ll continue to optimize along the way to meet your needs across different browsers.”

The celebratory six-month anniversary announcement also focused on other company products since launching generative AI in the search engine Bing and browser Edge.

And while the experience works well in most preferred browsers, Microsoft encourage users to use Bing in the Microsoft Edge browser. In Edge, users can have conversations with chat, access to chat history, and other Bing features built into the browser. 

Multimodal visual search in chat also is available. It relies on OpenAI models to allow users to input images, such as a picture taken by the user or one found elsewhere. 

Bing Chat now can understand the context of an image, interpret it, and answer questions about it. For example, users can go to Visual Search to ask Bing Chat about the architecture of a building in a photograph. 

Microsoft also mentioned the launch of Dark Mode for Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise, which includes commercial data protection for use inside organizations where sensitive data cannot leak out.

As of July, more than a dozen companies had restricted employees from using applications like ChatGPT due to data protection requirements. The companies include Amazon, Apple, Verizon, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, among others.

Microsoft confirmed in July that Bing Chat was testing in third-party browsers like Chrome and Safari for select users, putting the AI chatbot in direct competition with other browser’s built-in tools, such as Google’s generative AI search features that have become available in the Google mobile app and Chrome browser.