Bing adds new widgets with chatbot shortcut to its iOS app

June 17, 2023

2 min read

Bing adds new widget with chatbot shortcut to its iOS app

Microsoft has been putting a lot of effort into integrating Bing Search with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Now the company is rolling out a nice update to the Bing iOS app, which adds new widgets with a shortcut that takes the user directly to Bing Chat – Microsoft’s chatbot based on GPT technology.

As detailed by Microsoft in a blog post (via The Verge), the latest update to the Bing app for iOS comes with two new Home Screen widgets. These new widgets allow users to start a chat with just a tap. Previously, these widgets were only available on Android.

But of course, the action only takes the user to the right section of the app, since it’s not possible to interact with Home Screen widgets on iOS. This may change in the future, as iOS 17 introduces interactive widgets. However, this will require developers to update their apps with support for the new API – so don’t expect this to happen before the public release of iOS 17 this fall.

Still, having a shortcut to Bing Chat on the Home Screen of the iPhone and iPad can be very useful for those who use the feature frequently. There’s a variation of the widget with a custom wallpaper, and another with a plain background.

But that’s not the only new feature coming to the Bing app for iOS. The update also expands voice recognition and text-to-speech support to multiple new languages, such as Arabic, Czech, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Ukrainian. The update also improves the performance of the voice input button on the app.

You can download the Bing app for free on the App Store. It works with iPhones and iPads running iOS 14 or later.