Bing upgrades text-to-speech, expands intelligent answers, improves visual search

Bing announced large upgrades to their text-to-speech capabilities in voice search, improvements to their intelligent answers and visual search capabilities.

Intelligent answers. Bing’s intelligent answers are now smarter by leveraging their very own deep learning models, they said. Bing said they can now answer “harder questions than ever before” by being able to use advancements in GPU technology.

“Instead of the relatively simple answer to ‘what is the capital of Bangladesh’, Bing can now provide answers to more complex questions, such as ‘what are different types of lighting for a living room’, quicker than before,” the company said.

More human-like speech. When the Bing search app responds to you using voice, that voice sounds more human-like than ever. Bing said they “can speak answers to your queries back to you with a voice that’s nearly indistinguishable from a human’s.” Bing is able to do this through their AI human-like intonation and clear articulation of words.

You can hear this in action on the Bing blog.

Visual search. Bing has made improvements to its visual search capabilities as well. Bing said they made “huge strides in efficiency and coverage” around this feature.

The example given by Bing is “if you see an image of an accent light you like, Bing can show visually-similar decor and even show purchase options at different price points if the item is available online. To save you time, visual search also automatically detects and places clickable hotspots over important objects you may want to search for next.”

All of these improvements, Bing said, were only possible because of the Azure N-series virtual machines running NVIDIA GPUs.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.