Topic: Windows Phone 8.1

Bing Adds New Crawlers To Support Non-Responsive Mobile Designs

Bing announced a new set of mobile crawlers with Bingbot Mobile User Agents to better support and recognize mobile websites that are not responsively designed. Lee Xiong from the Bing Crawl team explained Bing has designed these new crawlers to “probe websites with a number of new crawlers with the aim to give us the best […]

Bing Launches Xiaolce Chinese Chatbot With Cortana Smarts For Windows Phone

After taking its Windows Phone 8.1 with Cortana to China last month, Bing announced today the launch of XiaoIce (“little ice”), a Chinese-speaking social assistant chatbot for Windows Phone users. According to the announcement on Bing’s search blog, XiaoIce’s technology is far beyond a normal chatbot. [blockquote cite=”Bing Search Blog”]XiaoIce is a sophisticated conversationalist with […]

Cortana Expands To Other Markets, Becomes “Xiao Na” In China

There’s increasing evidence that Microsoft’s personal assistant Cortana is being positioned as a key differentiator vs. Android and iPhones. A new TV commercial (below) purports to compare Cortana to Siri, with a mock Siri voice saying “I can’t do that” a number of times. This morning Microsoft announced new geographies and new features for Cortana […]

Microsoft: No Plans For Ads In Cortana Yet; Debating Bringing To Androids & iOS

It’s far too early to consider monetizing Cortana, Microsoft’s new virtual personal assistant, but the company is already thinking about how to scale her across different devices, platforms and around the world. Those were two of the key points from Microsoft’s keynote conversation Thursday morning at our SMX Advanced conference in Seattle. Marcus Ash, a […]

Microsoft’s Cortana Assistant Personalization Comes To Bing On The Web

One of the most interesting things about Microsoft’s new Cortana search assistant has just gone live for those early adopters of it: integration with Bing’s search results. Cortana Personalization Comes To Bing Those using Cortana will now find “personalized cards” that will appear at the bottom of the Bing home page: Personalized information cards will […]

Videos: Comparing Cortana & Siri & Google Now

Today, Microsoft released the developer preview of Windows Phone 8.1 and with that, the ability to play with a preview of Cortana, Microsoft’s answer to Apple Siri and Google Now. Both Gizmodo and CNet have released video demos comparing Cortana & Siri & Google Now. I like the Gizmodo comparison a little more, so we […]

Part Siri, Part Google Now: Microsoft Announces “Cortana” Virtual Assistant

Rumored for months, Microsoft has formally announced its answer to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Voice Search/Google Now: Cortana. Danny Sullivan is at the Microsoft Build Conference and live blogging it. Cortana appears to be sassy like Siri and can perform many of the functions that Google Now does (providing reminders and notifications regarding dates, meetings and […]