An all-singing, all-dancing version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine is now available on the Apple App Store that allows voice search, location finding and map access.
“Our investments in voice search (you may have played with them on Windows phones or BlackBerry already) continues in our iPhone App and works great for map locations, as well as old-fashioned web search,” Microsoft said in its Bing Blog.
The new Bing iPhone app allows searches of images, movies, maps, businesses, news and directions and even flight status.
“Just say ‘San Francisco weather,’ for a quick result, or even say a full address for a map or directions.
“Bing automatically finds your location. It’s also easy to discover a new spot by category, such as restaurants, banks and theatres, and choose whether you want walking or driving directions.
“We’ve got smooth mapping action. Swipe through each step of the directions, and check out how fast the map pans and zooms,” Microsoft said, revealing its uses Seadragon technology for some of this.
Bing for the iPhone and iPod is the third free app that Microsoft has put on the iTunes App Store. Prior to this it introduced Tag Reader, an application that reads Microsoft tags that resemble bar codes. Seadragon allows easy zooming of large images.
By John Kennedy
