When Microsoft’s next-generation gaming console, the Xbox One, comes out on Friday, it will arrive with Bing built-in to power a range of searches from games to music to television programs — and searches you can do just by speaking to the Xbox. Today, Bing shared a preview of how this will work.
On the Bing blog, Microsoft highlighted some of the searches Bing will be able to perform, writing:
Bing went on to say that under-the-hood, it’s using Deep Neural Network technology, which Bing says is similar to how the human brain works, in order to deal with conversationally-posed questions. Again, from the blog:
The blog also shared an impressive demonstration video of some of the searches in action, done by Larry Hyrb — “Major Nelson” — the director of programming for Xbox Live:
How well does it really work? We won’t know until we do some testing of our own with an Xbox One. Mine’s on order to arrive this Friday. But Bing already provides a very similar voice search feature for existing Xbox 360 consoles that have Kinect. Here’s a video of how that works, from when I tested it just after Bing voice search was introduced for Xbox in December 2011:
[youtube width=”560″ height=”315″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yho5lJq8jeA[/youtube]
A key difference with the Xbox One is the “always listening” feature, where even if the Xbox One is off, it will wake if it hears a voice command.
Another issue is that while Xbox can search for television, music or other content, actually viewing or listening to this type of material will depend whether you have various subscriptions to services enabled to run on the Xbox platform, such as Hulu Plus.
Related Articles
- Bing Becomes Hub Of Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience
- Microsoft Shows Off Coming Improvements To Bing App’s Voice Search
- Bing’s Voice Search On Xbox Now Searches The Web, Too
- Apple Makes Bing The “Default Search Engine” For Siri
- SMX Advanced: Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Pall Talks About Voice Search, Entities & More
- Google Adds TV Listings, But The Results Aren’t Ready For Prime Time
- Compared: What You Can Watch On Google Chromecast, Apple TV, Roku & Xbox
Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
