Microsoft brings ChatGPT-enhanced Bing to Android, but it can’t replace Google Assistant

The reinvented Bing fueled by ChatGPT certainly has a lot of interest, and Microsoft is now opening it up to a whole new set of users as Bing for Android and iOS opens up support for the AI experience.

Rolling out today to Android via Bing’s beta updates, the ChatGPT-enhanced version of the search engine is available to mobile users. The functionality is still locked to Microsoft’s own apps – namely Bing and Edge – but it certainly opens up new use cases.

Microsoft notes that most folks use search on their phones anyway, and illustrates how the new Bing could be useful on Android or iOS by suggesting using it to find things to do and a place to store luggage during an unexpected layover.

But what’s perhaps most important with this expansion of ChatGPT-enhanced Bing to Android and iOS is the arrival of voice support. Now, you can input queries and prompts using your voice instead of just typing everything out. Voice support is also now available on desktop.

Unfortunately, you can’t set the new Bing up as a replacement for Google Assistant as you could in the past. For years now Android has supported the option to chose a “default assist app,” which is set to Google Assistant for most folks. But apps such as Amazon Alexa, DuckDuckGo, Samsung’s Bixby, and Microsoft Bing have all been options for quite some time. Unfortunately, the Bing app does not support this feature any longer. We couldn’t track down exactly when the functionality was removed, but it was in place not too long ago.

Beyond the expansion to mobile, Microsoft also today announced that the new Bing is coming to Skype, with the ability to pull the AI chatbot into group messages. That’s in preview starting today, and Microsoft teases that similar features may one day show up in Teams.

Microsoft has had its fair share of blunders with the new Bing as of late, though. The company opted to restrict the chat experience to just five sequential responses per session – now upped to six – to avoid Bing going “off the rails” following some frightening examples of the AI generating weird, even threatening responses.

More on Microsoft:

• Microsoft aggressively trying to keep Chrome downloaders using Edge
• Bing with ChatGPT is Microsoft’s latest way to get you to switch from Google Chrome to Edge
• Microsoft ‘intends’ to enable Bing with ChatGPT on ‘all browsers’ as waitlist invites go out