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Apple iPhone users now have direct access to Microsoft Bing Chat through a new dedicated widget for iOS. The widget comes with other new Bing for iOS improvements, including expanded voice support.
Microsoft announced the feature in May and first rolled it out to Android users. Nonetheless, the widget should also be widely available to iOS users now. The widget brings two designs for the iOS app of Bing. Both have the same layout size, but one of them comes with an image background. Aside from a Bing Chat button, the widgets also include voice and image searches. There are also search bars for instant search access.
Alongside the widget, iPhone users will also benefit from the expansion of Microsoft’s text-to-speech support for Bing, which now includes Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Gujrati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Marathi, Norsk Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Urdu. According to the company, iOS and Android users can also expect an improved performance of the voice input button on the Bing mobile app.
The rollout of the widget and other improvements aim to encourage more iOS users to embrace Bing as their search engine, with Microsoft using its ChatGPT capability as the main attraction. To recall, the arrival of ChatGPT-powered Bing made noise globally, luring many to try “Sydney,” which initially became famous for its bizarre personality and responses. However, this seems to be no longer the case, especially now that the official ChatGPT app is already available for iOS users. The app’s release was even welcomed warmly on Play Store, hitting 480,000 installs within its first five days. That was on Play Store alone, but it was already more than Bing and Edge’s respective 340,000 and 335,000 downloads on iOS and Android platforms. According to data.ai, the launch of the ChatGPT app for iOS is also the second most successful launch after Truth Social, which collected 630,000 downloads during its first five days on iOS and Google Play.
