Microsoft is reimagining how people interact with autonomous agents through a new open project called NLWeb. Designed to bring natural language interfaces to websites, it transforms ordinary web pages into conversational agents, enabling users to interact directly with the site’s content. The company is betting on this to be as impactful on the agentic web as HTML has been on the standard web.
NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, promises to transform how we search for information online, whether on a blog, social network, customer support portal, or complex corporate site. At least a dozen publishers and companies, including Shopify, Tripadvisor, Snowflake, Eventbrite, O’Reilly Media, and Chicago Public Media, have already implemented this project.
Website owners could potentially leverage the project to implement more intelligent archival searching, display personalized article recommendations to visitors, provide customer support for subscriptions without requiring users to leave the site, generate interactive explainers for complex content articles, and more.
It was created by Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow R.V. Guha, who also invented the RSS, RDF, and Schema.org web standards. Coincidentally, NLWeb is leveraging these semi-structured formats, combining them with AI tools to produce a chat interface that can be used by humans and agents.
One notable feature is that supported websites also become Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. This allows any agent and participant in the MCP space to discover a site’s content. NLWeb is also technology agnostic, so it will work across all the major operating systems.
That said, it’s worth looking at what controls NLWeb offers to publishers to protect specific pieces of content from being used to train the models or inform an agent’s response.
Subscribe to The AI Economy
Microsoft hopes to improve agent accessibility by bringing conversational AI to websites. If NLWeb gains wide adoption, customers won’t be required to install an app to ask questions. Instead, it’s all on the web, open to anyone.
NLWeb is yet another initiative Microsoft has announced at this year’s Build conference that demonstrates how it envisions the broadening agent ecosystem. Along with this project, the company has added support for these autonomous bots on the Edge browser and on Windows.
Developers can dive into the NLWeb GitHub repository to find everything needed to get started. The repo includes the core service for handling natural language queries, along with instructions for customization and extension. It also offers connectors for popular language models and vector databases, tools for ingesting data from formats like JSONL and RSS, and a web server frontend to tie it all together.
Featured Image: An AI-generated image depicting a chat interface on a computer screen. Credit: Adobe Firefly
Subscribe to “The AI Economy”
Exploring AI’s impact on business, work, society, and technology.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.