Microsoft wants to change the Internet

NLWeb allows websites to provide an interface with a few lines of code or an AI model of their choice along with their own data. Photo: The Verge .

Announced at Build 2025, Microsoft's open-source project NLWeb will allow websites to provide "conversational interfaces" — text fields and submit buttons that give users a few lines of code or an AI model of their choice and their own data.

In an example provided by the software giant, a retailer could use NLWeb to create a chatbot that helps users choose clothes for specific trips, while another experiment saw a cooking site use NLWeb to build a chatbot that suggests dishes to pair with existing recipes.

"Essentially, NLWeb handles all the logistics of turning questions into answers. Your job is just to provide the data.

By limiting things to a platform and domain of expertise, along with some general knowledge that most existing models have, users can quickly create something much better than a general-purpose chatbot,” said Ramanathan V. Guha, a technology engineer at Microsoft.

Another advantage of NLWeb is its low cost. According to Guha, to have a web search index, users need to crawl the web and store it. That is expensive for both the search engine and the websites involved.

With NLWeb, however, users just need to put data into the vector database and it will run on it. The source code can even use a free model, like the demo Guha is using, GPT-4o Mini, to support its operation.

Source: https://znews.vn/microsoft-dang-muon-thay-doi-internet-post1554334.html