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Microsoft Adds AI Assistant to Its Edge Browser

It's only available to people who have signed up for the program, but it provides a glimpse of how AI might transform web searches.
By Josh Norem
Microsoft Edge icon
Credit: Microsoft

Microsoft has added an AI assistant to version 111 of its Edge browser. Dubbed Copilot, the assistant will appear in the right-hand sidebar if you're enrolled in the program. If you aren't, go to Bing.com to join the waitlist. The assistant can perform various services, from providing conversational search results to producing written content tailored to your prompts. It's the latest effort from Microsoft to leap ahead of its competitors in bringing AI to its products. Previously it added its Bing AI to the Windows search bar.

To access the new features, ensure you're running version 111 of Edge. Next, click the bright blue Bing icon on the right-hand side of the browser. It'll ask you some questions before it's up and running. The first is how you want the bot to deliver content to you. You can choose from Precise, Creative, or Balanced. Next, you must allow or deny Bing the ability to read the page you're viewing. This is necessary for it to summarize a page's contents, but it's optional. Also, choosing Creative results will affect how accurate Bing is, according to PCWorld.

Bing Copilot
Bing's AI Copilot can now write emails and blog posts for you. Credit: Josh Norem

You can start using the service with those questions out of the way. Its functionality is divided into three clickable links at the top of the sidebar: Chat, Compose, and Insights. Chat is the conversational AI we've all seen before, and Microsoft asks you to pose tough questions. For example, you can ask it to provide recipes for a picky eater that doesn't like anything orange. We asked it what it thought was a good gaming PC, and after providing links to several gaming rigs, it asked us, "what kind of games do you play?" to further refine the results. The results it gave us were outdated, though, as it recommended PCs made over a year ago.

Bing opines on gaming PCs
Bing's opinion on gaming PCs is outdated as it recommended an Intel Core i9-11900K system from Corsair. Credit: Josh Norem

The more exciting feature is the new Compose tool. You can have it write a wide range of text that's customizable in many ways. For example, you can choose from a paragraph, blog post, email, or a list of ideas. Additionally, you can tailor the results to be professional, casual, funny, enthusiastic, or informational. Humor is obviously subjective, but it did provide two versions of an intro for this article. One was PR-like, and the funny version (above) had a more conversational tone.

The Insights feature doesn't seem as useful. For example, we asked it about ExtremeTech, and it just gave us a rudimentary amount of info about when it was founded, what it covers, and who runs it. Unfortunately, its information was outdated and probably just pulled from Wikipedia.

Finally, Microsoft has added auto-hide functionality to the sidebar, a handy feature. The company's release notes for Edge say this will allow users to access it when desired without sucking up precious screen real estate.

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Generative AI Microsoft Edge Windows 11 Upgrade Microsoft Bing

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