Microsoft today revealed sophisticated new capabilities on its Bing search platform. Bing corporate vice-president Gurdeep Singh Pall revealed new voice, mapping and 3D tools and said that Bing is now open as a platform for developers to build upon.
Pall said that Bing has been growing market share at a rate of 7pc a month in recent months and the search engine powers searches on Facebook as well as Apple’s Siri.
“We’ve built some amazing capabilities into the platform, with internet-scale infrastructure and we have an understanding of user intent and we have built technologies that make sense of the unstructured content on the web.”
He said that Bing is now a platform that extends across the PC, smartphones, Office, the clod and web indexing to now handling entities and knowledge, natural user interfaces and real world applications.
Bing technology will feature in the forthcoming Xbox One, he added.
Future apps will have eyes, ears and a mouth
The intention now is to capture the knowledge of the web through natural user interface capabilities such as sound, vision and touch.
“We are working on a whole lot of new marketing and visualisation capabilities through new APIs and controls.”
He showed how voice searches conducted on Bing could be used to deliver voice tours of cities such as Valencia in Spain and combining this with 3D overviews of cities to perform the narrative of the city tour.
“Windows 8.1 Maps app will come with 3D imagery,” he confirmed, “allowing developers to add 3D controls to the apps they are creating.”
The Windows 8.1 Preview is available for download beginning today at http://www.preview.windows.com.
Other new features coming to Bing will be image scanning, instant word translation and the capabilities to add search results and scanned knowledge to trip itineraries, for example.
“In this coming decade apps will have eyes, ears and a mouth. The opportunity is to create seamless experiences for developers and users,” Pall said, adding that a new Bing developer portal will be unveiled by Microsoft.
