Mar 22, 2013 at 2:23pm ET by Matt McGee

Microsoft has shared video of what was a confidential, employee-only demonstration of new voice search capabilities in its Bing app for Windows Phones. The demo, reported by MSFTKitchen, shows a substantially faster and more accurate voice search experience that also performs better in noisy situations. In the demo, Bing's new voice search system appears to respond about twice as fast as the existing system. The speed improvement gives Bing the ability to show search results while the user is still saying the search query. The Microsoft employee giving the demo says that the new s [...]

Bing’s Voice Search On Xbox Now Searches The Web, Too

Oct 23, 2012 at 3:51pm ET by Matt McGee

Microsoft is expanding Bing's capabilities in the living room with news today that Xbox users can search the web via their console. It's part of the "new entertainment experience" that Microsoft is pushing out this week via the Xbox. Bing Voice Search has been available on the Xbox since June 2011, but it could only search content available via the console itself -- games, movies, TV shows, music and so forth. But Microsoft has added Internet Explorer into the mix, and with that comes the ability to do Bing voice searches of web content, not just Xbox content. Here's how Bing explains it [...]

Confirmed: Bing 411 Closing June 1st

May 10, 2012 at 9:34am ET by Barry Schwartz

Microsoft is closing down their toll-free voice search program named Bing 411. I have confirmed the Bing 411 service is closing by calling the service and hearing immediately the message: Bing 411: On June 1st, we are discontinuing the Bing 411 service. There were reports of this via LiveSide where they said they "received a tip" on this news. But this is indeed happening and Bing is closing down their 411 service. Google shut down their GOOG-411 service back in 2010. Bing kept theirs live hoping to fill that void, but clearly with the rise of smartphones and voice search embedde [...]

Bing Becomes Hub Of Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience

Dec 5, 2011 at 2:23am ET by Matt McGee

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 ult [...]

Bing Voice Search Coming To Xbox

Jun 6, 2011 at 4:50pm ET by Matt McGee

Later this year, Bing search will take on a new platform: the Xbox entertainment/gaming console. And to prove that it's all cutting edge stuff in the gamers' world, Bing will be offering a voice-based search engine (in addition to a traditional text/type-based search) to help users find games, movies and TV shows, music and other content that's available via the Xbox. From the Bing blog post: By combining all this content with the power of Bing's deep search expertise, Microsoft Tellme's voice technology and the magic of Kinect, we'll be able to provide instant access to the expansiv [...]

GOOG-411 Winds Down, Bing-411 Parties On

Oct 9, 2010 at 1:26pm ET by Greg Sterling

Yesterday Google announced that it was shutting down 800-GOOG-411, the free directory assistance (or voice search) service it launched in April, 2007. Back in those days the mobile landscape looked very different than it does today. It was challenging to conduct searches on most mobile phones and the iPhone was in its infancy. The first Android handset, the G1, was still almost 18 months away. The conventional wisdom was that "free DA" would become a booming segment in mobile, with lots of usage and potential ad revenues. Many of the large telco-incumbents that provide traditional, paid 411 [...]

Bing Adds Voice-Guided Turn-by-Turn Navigation To Windows Mobile App

May 11, 2010 at 12:35pm ET by Greg Sterling

Bing has added voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation to the Bing mobile app for Windows Phones 6.1 and above. Bing thus joins Google, Nokia and to a lesser degree MapQuest in offering free mobile navigation services. It also means more woe for the PND makers (TomTom, Garmin, et al). The voice component of the Bing navigation service is powered by Tellme: We took advantage of the Microsoft Tellme team’s expertise in voice applications to deliver an amazingly lifelike voice experience for the turn-by-turn navigation. If you have a Windows phones on Sprint, T-Mobile, or AT&T you can u [...]

Bing’s New iPhone App Goes Live

Dec 15, 2009 at 10:00pm ET by Greg Sterling

Microsoft's new Bing iPhone app -- that's right, you heard it correctly -- is an accomplishment on many levels. Microsoft has come a long way in acknowledging the importance of the iPhone platform. And the app itself offers a terrific overall mobile search experience, particularly in maps and local. It's available this evening in the iTunes app store. In short, it's well designed, intuitive, pleasing to look at and most importantly useful. How does it compare to Google, which dominates search on the iPhone? It stacks up very well and offers a more "integrated" experience in many respects. B [...]

Bing’s New Mobile Voice Search Available On New Samsung Phone

Oct 7, 2009 at 1:09pm ET by Matt McGee

The Bing Search Blog has announced a new mobile voice search capability that competes with, and even one-ups the more well known mobile voice search tools from Google. The Bing voice search tool has three capabilities: search Bing by speaking a query dial a contact's phone by speaking the number compose a text message by speaking it As eWeek's Google Watch points out, that last feature -- the ability to speak a text message -- is something that Google voice search doesn't offer natively. (There are some Android apps that make it possible, however.) These three features were a [...]

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