Web developers will be able to start leveraging on-device AI in Microsoft’s Edge browser soon, using new APIs that can give their web apps access to Microsoft’s Phi-4-mini model, the company announced at its Build conference today. And Microsoft says the API will be cross-platform, so it sounds like these APIs will work with the Edge browser in macOS, as well.
Microsoft is opening its on-device AI models up to web apps in Edge
A new set of APIs gives web apps the ability to offer prompt boxes and writing tools that use local AI models through the Edge browser.
is a former weekend editor who covered tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020.
The 3.8-billion-parameter Phi-4-mini is Microsoft’s latest small, on-device model, rolled out in February alongside the company’s larger Phi-4. With the new APIs, web developers will be able to add prompt boxes and offer writing assistance tools for text generation, summarizing, and editing. And within the next couple of months, Microsoft says it will also release a text translation API.
Microsoft is putting these “experimental” APIs forth as potential web standards, and in addition to being cross-platform, it says they’ll also work with other AI models. Developers can start trialing them in the Edge Canary and Dev channels now, the company says.
Google offers similar APIs for its Chrome browser. With them, developers can use Chrome’s built-in models to offer things like text translation, prompt boxes for text and image generation, and calendar event creation based on webpage content.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
