Bing Chat launches an iOS widget as part of this week's dev update

It's been yet another fairly quiet week in terms of updates from Microsoft's Bing Chat team. However, the team members have not been taking a vacation. They have added a new mobile feature and made some improvements to the chatbot's voice support in the past week.

In the latest Bing blog post, Microsoft announced that a new Bing Chat widget is now available for iOS device owners. They can now launch the chat directly from their Apple iPhone or iPad home screen. You can find out how to add the Bing Chat widget, or any iOS widget, at Apple's support page.

Microsoft has also added a ton of new languages for Bing Chat's text-to-speech feature on the desktop that was officially launched last week. Here's the list:

•  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
•  Urdu

Finally, the blog post mentions that the Bing Chat mobile apps should have some new performance improvements:

We’ve improved the performance of the voice input button on the Bing mobile app for iOS and Android. It should now indicate it’s listening instantly once you tap it.

We are still waiting to see if Microsoft will officially launch support for third-party web browsers like Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari on the desktop. Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, confirmed earlier in June that experimental support for third party browsers was being tested by a few users but there's no word on when that support will expand to all Bing Chat users.

We are also still waiting for Microsoft to pull the trigger on third-party plugin support for Bing Chat. The company released a long list of companies during Build 2023 that plan to offer plug-in support for the chatbot sometime in 2023.

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