Microsoft is opening its on-device AI models up to web apps in Edge

is a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020. 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. 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 be ... Read full article.