Microsoft Introduces 'NLWeb' To Help Developers 'Turn Any Site Into An AI-Powered App'

The internet is still growing as more nodes are connected and as a result the web is growing alongside it.

But since OpenAI popularized chatbots with the release of ChatGPT and followed by others in a fierce competition, web traffic trends literally shifted from visiting websites to asking chatbots for answers. While Google, the gateway of the web with its search engine, has tried to deny this, a lot of websites continue to see declines after declines.

Microsoft, a rival of Google, tries a different approach.

Instead of just pushing more and more people into using LLMs through its Copilot and browse the web from there, the tech company is also giving developers an AI-powered superpower to power their websites.

To do this, Microsoft introduces 'NLWeb,' an open-source initiative that brings AI to websites, "making it easy to turn any site into an AI-powered app."

On a post on its website, Microsoft said that:

Announced during its Build developer conference, NLWeb is designed to help developers build a natural language interface for their websites using the model of their choice and data to answer user queries about the contents of the website.

NLWeb was conceived and developed by Ramanathan V. Guha, a CVP and technical fellow at Microsoft, who is also the creator of popular web standards, such as RSS, RDF, and Schema.org.

According to him, there have been three revolution when it comes it comes to human-computer interaction: graphical user interfaces, the internet, and mobile. This time, we’re in the middle of the fourth.

But not wanting to let AI takes all the credits through their dedicated platforms, Guha wants this revolution to be "being able to communicate with applications, and computers in general, with free-form language."

Guha thinks that a lot of people are now mediated with chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and so forth, including Copilot. But he doesn't like the idea that the web being utterly consumed by chatbots, which take all their knowledge and return no value.

And NLWeb is his way to fix this.

First of, NLWeb uses frameworks such as RSS, RDF, and Schema.org along with websites’ data and LLMs to create an AI assistant or agents. And as an open protocol, NLWeb supports most models, most vector databases, and major cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud and AWS.

And because NLWeb’s support for Anthropic-developed Model Context Protocol (MCP), the tool can retrieve information from various sources, given that it's provided access.

Since MCP is designed to streamline the process of connecting AI agents to data sources, Microsoft believes that NLWeb will act as the new HTML because using it will make websites able to make their content discoverable and accessible to other AI agents and other participants in the MCP ecosystem.

Use cases include a retailer's website using NLWeb to create a chatbot that helps visitors choose clothing for specific trips, and a cooking website using it to build a bot that suggests dishes to pair with a recipe.

"It’s a protocol," Guha explained, "and the protocol is a way of asking a natural-language question, and the answer comes back in structured form."

In essence, NLWeb is an AI that turn queries people put into ordinary field or search box into an answer, not just a list of results.

All developers have to do, is supply the data.

Guha's idea is to make it easy for any website on the web, or app, to add an LLM-powered feature with only a few lines of code.

Developers can choose their own AI model, and give NLWeb whatever data they want, and have the custom chatbot up and running in just a few minutes.

The advantage is that, NLWeb can be a cheap solution than having an embedded external search engines, with Guha saying that "I just take an RSS feed, put it in a vector database, and it runs off that."

"It allows for the remixing, and the back and forth, at an incredibly low price."

"Building conversational interfaces for websites is hard. NLWeb seeks to make it easy for websites to do this. And since NLWeb natively speaks MCP, the same natural language APIs can be used both by humans and agents," said Microsoft in NLWeb's page on GitHub.

In other words, in the era where AI-powered chatbots have become the go-to places for many, developers using NLWeb on their websites don't have to rely on some external AI product to answer people’s questions, and just hope and pray the bot sends the link to them. With NLWeb, they can run the bot themselves.