Bing Becomes Hub Of Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience

As promised, Bing is the focus of a new Xbox experience that’s launching this week.

Beginning on Tuesday, Xbox Live users who also have Kinect will be able to use their voice — and Bing’s search technology — to find different types of content that are available on their television, including movies from Netflix, TV shows on Hulu Plus, music from Zune, video games and more. Here’s an excerpt from Microsoft’s news release, the full text of which also introduces several new content partners:

The power of Kinect combined with the intelligence of Bing search is turning your voice into the ultimate remote control. With Bing on Xbox, you can use your voice to effortlessly find the games, movies, TV shows and music you want and discover the best offerings on Xbox LIVE, by simply saying what you’re searching for. You say it, Xbox finds it. Beginning tomorrow and over the coming weeks, Bing on Xbox voice search will initially be available in English in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. for Zune video, Xbox LIVE Marketplace and select content partners. For those who do not have a Kinect for Xbox 360, text search will be available in Xbox LIVE markets.

In one of Microsoft’s promotional images, a Bing voice search for “X-Men” on the Xbox brings up a mix of movie and video game results (and what I think is a TV cartoon on the far right).

Microsoft first previewed and promised Bing voice search on the Xbox this past summer. Also of note is last month’s departure of key executive Yusuf Mehdi from Bing’s division to the Xbox division.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan:

We’ll be playing more with Bing for Xbox in the coming days. For now, Engadget has a very nice write-up of some of the features.

Below is a short video I shot, of using Bing with Voice Commands through Kinect on my own Xbox 360. I purposely didn’t read up on a lot of the commands, just to see how it worked. Surprisingly well, especially as you get used to it.

[youtube width=”560″ height=”315″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yho5lJq8jeA[/youtube]