Microsoft releases NLWEB: An open project that allows developers to easily turn any website into an application with AI-capable natural language interface

Many websites lack an easy-to-access and cost-effective approach to integrating natural language interfaces, making it difficult for users to interact with website content through conversational AI. Existing solutions often depend on centralized, proprietary services or require a lot of technical expertise, limiting scalability and adaptability. This creates a barrier for developers who want to implement smart agents that can answer questions or use website data to help users. As a result, an open standardized approach is needed that allows websites to expose structured information and support natural language interactions without heavily relying on external infrastructure or high-cost models.
Building a conversational interface for a website remains a complex challenge, often requiring custom solutions and deep technical expertise. NLWEB developed by Microsoft researchers is designed to simplify this process by making it easy for sites to support natural language interactions. Through local integration with Machine Communication Protocol (MCP), NLWEB allows both human users and AI agents to use the same language interface. It builds on existing web standards such as Schema.org and RSS (which have been used by millions of websites) provide a semantic basis that makes it easy to take advantage of natural language capabilities.
NLWEB is not a single tool or product, but a set of open protocols and open source reference implementations designed to lay the foundation for the AI-Spair Web. Like HTML once did for document sharing, NLWEB envisions a shared infrastructure that integrates conversational AI into web content. Its sample code is a practical starting point, rather than the final solution, encouraging community innovation and various implementations. This open collaboration model draws inspiration from the early days of the Internet, and common standards and grassroots efforts have promoted rapid progress. NLWEB’s goal is to enable human-friendly interfaces and proxy-to-proxy communications through a common protocol for an AI-driven web experience.
NLWEB consists of two main components: a simple protocol for interacting with the website’s natural language, and a JSON-based response format using Schema.org. It includes an implementation that works for websites structured in a list of items (such as products or reviews) and provides UI widgets to enable conversations to be accessed to such content. NLWEB also acts as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, allowing AI models to ask questions through a standardized “query” approach. Responsiveness combines existing site data with insights from large language models to enhance user interaction. NLWEB is open, cross-platform, and compatible with a variety of AI models and vector databases, providing flexible integration options.
NLWEB provides a simple way for Web Publishers to add conversational AI to their website with minimal encoding without having to build a chatbot from scratch. It uses existing site data to ensure accurate, real-time response while keeping costs low. Publishers can choose the AI model used to use and maintain their data. The system improves user engagement by enabling natural interactions, personalized content and enhanced support. Its open source nature allows customization, and it positions the website as a future for AI proxy browsing and interacting with the web.
In short, NLWEB represents a fundamental step towards a more interactive and intelligent network where users can interact with the website through natural language rather than rigid interfaces. NLWEB simplifies the creation of conversational experiences by combining structured data formats such as schema.org with the capabilities of AI models. It enables publishers to enhance their website with minimal effort, thus providing benefits such as improved user engagement, faster support and personalized content delivery. As the network evolves into an ecosystem, AI agents play an increasingly important role, and NLWEB ensures that websites are not only accessible to humans, but also seamlessly integrate with a proxy-driven digital future.
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Sana Hassan, a consulting intern at Marktechpost and a dual-degree student at IIT Madras, is passionate about applying technology and AI to address real-world challenges. He is very interested in solving practical problems, and he brings a new perspective to the intersection of AI and real-life solutions.
