Is Microsoft’s use of NLWeb to create AI app good or bad?
ComputerWorld.com reported that Microsoft “Announced at its ongoing Build developer conference, NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, is designed to help enterprises 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.” The May 20, 2025 article entitled “Why is Microsoft offering to turn websites into AI apps with NLWeb?” (https://www.computerworld.com/article/3990399/why-is-microsoft-offering-to-turn-websites-into-ai-apps-with-nlweb.html) included these comments about “What is NLWeb and how does it work?”:
NLWeb was conceived and developed by RV Guha — the creator of popular web standards, such as RSS, RDF, and Schema.org — who is currently a CVP and technical fellow at Microsoft.
NLWeb, according to Microsoft, uses frameworks such as RSS, RDF, and Schema.org along with websites’ data and LLMs to create an AI assistant or agents.
While RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, is a feed format that captures and shares changes made to a website, RDF, short for Resource Description Framework, is a standard way to exchange metadata over the web.Schema.org, on the other hand, is another community-based project that is aimed at allowing users and enterprises to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, and in email messages, among other environments.
As an open protocol, NLWeb supports most models, most vector databases, and major cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud and AWS.
In NLWeb’s documentation, Microsoft said that it has tested the protocol on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Qdrant, Snowflake, Milvus, Azure AI Search, and with LLMs, including Deepseek, Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude.
Very interesting! What do you think?