During its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced a new open source project called NLWeb (Natural Language Web) that could change the way we interact with online content.
NLWeb aims to make any website have the capability receive and reacts to Natural Language queries, by turning any web page into a dynamic, AI-driven application.
NLWeb is the “fastest and easiest way to make your website a an AI app that works,” claims Microsoft, which suggests users can ask questions about a site’s content with plain language just as one might use an AI assistant.
And it removes the old search boxes and intricate navigation, so you can look forward to a more intuitive and conversational web experience.
In addition to the basic chatbot setup, NLWeb-enabled websites will also serve as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.
By Anthropic The open-source standard for connecting machine learning systems to data sources MCP, developed by Anthropic, is a standard that enables AI systems to join data sources across organizational boundaries. This indicates that the websites that adopt NLWeb will be exposed and accessible to a broader AI agents.
Microsoft imagines a future “agentic web” in which AI agents are able to effortlessly pull data, and take action, from across any number of websites, possibly automating activities such as sales, negotiation, customer service and product returns.
R.V. Guha, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow, architect of popular web standards including RSS and Schema. org) led the development of NLWeb.
Microsoft says that NLWeb is technology agnostic and works across all leading operating systems, AI models and vector databases, enabling developers to be flexible in deployment decisions.
A dozen companies and organizations — including Chicago Public Media, Eventbrite, Hearst (Delish), Shopify and Tripadvisor — are already working with NLWeb as early adopters.
Microsoft has open-sourced the NLWeb code and the documentation on GitHub and is urging the community to further develop and use this pioneering technology.
Microsoft envisions NLWeb will democratise the creation of AI-enhanced online experiences and potentially be as transformative for the “agentic web” as HTML was for the conventional web, making the web a lot more richer and smarter.