Actually, this is just one of many new features coming to Xbox. The company made a huge “future of TV” announcement for the Xbox 360. This includes a group of new apps aimed at boosting the entertainment potential of the console. It includes a lot of television and video related content. More on that here.

“Bing on Xbox opens up living room entertainment the same way search engines opened up the web,” says Bing GM Mike Nichols. “When you think about the state of entertainment, there isn’t a lack of selection, the challenge is finding what you want in a timely manner. Now when you say “Xbox, Bing, Star Trek,” Bing will show you all the available options for the movies, music, games, on-demand TV and apps that match that title.”

“Our goal with features like Bing on Xbox is to make Bing available in convenient and intuitive ways that take advantage of the capabilities of your device,” adds Nichols. “You can see this today with features like: voice search on Bing for Mobile, implicit search such as Local Scout on Windows Phone, the ability to search using your phone’s camera with Bing Vision, and touch/contextual search through the Lasso feature on the Bing for iPad. With Bing on Xbox, we are introducing a more natural way to search on the TV. And as a result, you can spend more time enjoying your entertainment, and far less time hunting for it.”

I was just saying the other day how it was surprising that Microsoft doesn’t utilize its Xbox platform more to Bing’s advantage. Frankly, they could still go further if you ask me.

Reports have Google’s deal with Mozilla dead, with a huge window of opportunity for Bing to slip in and boost its search market share there. It remains to be seen if that will happen, but with a Mozilla deal and more of a web focus on Xbox, Bing could potentially make some pretty substantial inroads in its competition with Google.

Bing for Xbox voice search will be available in English in the U.S., Canda and the U.K. for Zune video, Xbox Live Marketplace and select content partners at first. For those who don’t have Kinect, text search will be available in Xbox Live markets.

Today, Google announced that this functionality has come to Google Maps (also in Chrome) in the U.S.

“Using voice search can make it easier to find hard-to-spell places (like Poughkeepsie or Liechtenstein) or simply get directions without typing (for example, say “Directions from Los Angeles to San Francisco”),” says Google software engineer Jed Burgess. “Or if you’re interested in exploring the world through the Earth layer (using the plugin), you can just say where you want to go and fly over to that location directly within your browser!”

As I mentioned when I covered the launch of Voice Search for Desktop, I’m not sure how often I would find myself using it (which I don’t think I have since the day of the launch). I really don’t even use it on mobile all that often either. From the desktop especially, it seems easier to just type your query out, even when you have a hard time spelling it. Google’s pretty good about knowing what you meant.

All of that said, the feature is certainly a good thing for accessibility for the disabled. It will be interesting to see if this expands beyond the Chrome browser.

To use the feature, you will click a button off to the side of the search box, and speak your query. Obviously, you’ll need a mic.

To be honest, I’m not sure how often I would find myself using voice search from the desktop. Quite frankly, I don’t use it from my mobile device all that often. It’s just easier to type it, even from mobile, because all too often, it voice search doesn’t get the query right. I’m sure this will improve over time, and has already improved since it was first introduced, but I’ll still probably go to typing by default in most cases – especially on the desktop. That said, the feature has tremendous advantages in terms of accessibility for the disabled.

“We train our systems on massive amounts of data,” Google says. “You cover the differences in pronunciation with learning algorithms.” More from Google’s blog post about it:

You’ve been able to use Voice Search on mobile devices since 2008, but you’re probably so used to typing your searches that you don’t immediately think to use your voice. With Voice Search now available on desktop, searching by voice is becoming more ubiquitous and the idea of being able to speak your search will be more familiar, no matter what you’re searching for.

Voice Search can be especially useful for long queries such as [pictures of big wave surfing in Waimea Bay] or words that are hard to spell like [Schenectady, New York]. It’s also a helpful option if you’re in a conversational mood and you’d rather ask your question out loud than think of the keywords to type. For example, maybe you just to find “a recipe for spaghetti with bolognese sauce.” Just click the microphone icon in the search box and ask out loud.

For now, voice search from the desktop will only be available for Chrome, as it takes advantage of Chrome’s speech technology. It will be rolling out this week for all Chrome users in English. It really illustrates an interesting strategy of Google’s to enable new features to its core search product using its browser, which should only serve to generate more interest in the browser, which could also inspire more interest in its recently launched Chrome OS operating system.

Google’s Chromebooks come out tomorrow.

Google will get to know your voice and understand it, and your search queries will become more accurate. Google’s Amir Mané and Glen Shires explain:

If you opt into personalized recognition, we begin to associate the recordings of the words that you ask us to recognize with your Google account. We then automatically use these words to build a speech model specifically for you. This speech model enables us to deliver greater recognition accuracy. Although subtle, accuracy improvements begin fairly quickly and will build over time.

The first time you use Voice Search, you’ll be presented with a dialog to turn on personalized recognition. Google takes your privacy seriously, so you can enable or disable personalized recognition at any time through the Google voice recognition settings on your phone. If you’d like to disassociate your voice recordings from your Google Account, you can do so through the Google Dashboard in the Speech section.

I find it interesting that Google is tying individual voices to Google accounts. While the feature is opt-in and only described as a way to accomplish increased search accuracy, we’ll see if Google finds other applicable places to take advantage of this in the future. Perhaps voice search will find its way into Chrome OS. Maybe one day you’ll be able to get your phone to talk to you using your own voice (if you’re one of those people that likes to hear yourself talk). Google did acquire Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company earlier this month. 

"In Star Trek, they don’t spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards—they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back," said Google Speech Technology Manager Mike Cohen. "It’s a more natural way to communicate, but getting there requires chipping away at a range of hard research problems. We’ve recently made some strides with speech technologies and tools that take voice input: for example, we launched Voice Search, Voice Input and Voice Actions for mobile phones, allowing you to speak web searches, compose emails by voice, ask your phone to play any song, and more. And last year we started automatically transcribing speech to produce captions on YouTube videos." 

Phonetic Arts comes in when you start talking about computers talking back to you. 

For now, the new voice search recognition feature is just for voice search accuracy. Maybe that’s all it will ever be for, but we’ll see.  It’s currently only available in English in the US, but this will no doubt expand broadly in due time. To get the feature, if you have FroYo or better, simply download the voice search app from the Android Market. There’s a QR code here.

A post on the Google Research Blog explained the need for this development.  "People in Hong Kong typically use either ‘Cangjie’ or ‘Handwriting’ input methods.  Cangjie has a steep learning curve and requires users to break the Chinese characters down into sequences of graphical components.  The Handwriting method is easier to learn, but slow to use.  Neither is an ideal input method for people in Hong Kong trying to use Google Search on their mobile phones."

Also, "Speaking is generally much faster and more natural than typing."  And "some Chinese characters . . . are used so rarely used that people often know only the pronunciation, and not how to write them."

So Cantonese Voice Search is meant to address these issues, making things easier on users.  It might be considered a "thank you" to Hong Kong’s citizens following the whole mainland China censorship/server switch affair.

Of course, Google isn’t likely to complain if Cantonese Voice Search attracts a few new users at the same time.

Google intends to move forward with its work on other Chinese languages, too.

With Voice Action, you can initiate the sending of text messages, listening to songs, calls to businesses or contacts, emails, web surfing, and more.

"Our mobile phones have become modern-day Swiss Army knives. An Android phone is a handheld computer, a music player, a notepad, a GPS navigation unit and more, all rolled into one sleek device that fits in your pocket," Google says. "Today’s phones do so many things for us that sometimes we don’t even think about how we do them."

"Even though our phones do all these new things, the most natural way of interacting with a phone remains what it always has been: speaking," Google adds.

Here is the list of commands:

Google has also launched an update of its search widget for Android so when you type a local search query, you’ll get suggested businesses with addresses and languages. This also requires FroYo.  Both features will be preinstalled on the Droid 2.

In addition to these new features, Google announced a new Chrome Extension for Android users today that lets you send links from your desktop to your phone.

Google Maps Navigation is Google’s GPS navigation system, and this would be version 4.2 of the service. It works on Android devices 1.6 and higher, and provides turn-by-turn voice guidance as a free feature of Google Maps.

Search by Voice

Google Maps Navigation comes with Google’s Search by Voice Feature, and it just so happens that this feature also received an update today. It now recognizes French, Italian, and Spanish, in addition to the languages it already supported (English, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese).

This feature goes well beyond Google Maps, and into Google search in general. Android 2.1 (and later) users that have the Quick Search Box installed can simply tap the microphone icon to start a voice search. iPhone and Blackberry users who have Google Mobile installed can enable voice search by selecting the new languages from the settings panel.

"Our goal is to bring Google Search by voice to speakers of all languages," says Amir Mané, Product Manager, Google Speech Technologies. "We follow a rigorous process to add each new language or dialect. Working directly with native speakers in each country, we spend weeks collecting spoken utterances to create the specific models which power the service. Our helpers are asked to read popular queries in their native tongue, in a variety of acoustic conditions such as in restaurants, out on busy streets, and inside cars. We also construct, for each language, a vocabulary of over one million recognizable words. It’s no small feat, but we love doing it."

"Note that our new language models are designed for accents from Spain, France, Italy, and Germany," adds Mané. "If you speak one of the new languages with another accent (for example, German in Austria, French in Switzerland, or Spanish in Mexico), Search by voice may not work so well for you."

Google Maps Navigation can be downloaded (on supported devices) by searching for Google Maps in the Android Market. Note that the product is in beta, which means it is subject to imperfections – certainly worth noting, considering the recent incident with Google’s walking directions.

"As mobile consumers increasingly rely on their mobile device to find and immediately use local information, we are focused on integrating new features to help users easily navigate their everyday lives," says David Williams, vice president of mobile product management at AT&T Interactive. "The addition of voice search complements the text-based local search experience by expanding the situations in which users can use the YPmobile App, making finding nearby businesses even easier."

In addition to Voice Search, the app also comes equipped with new map-based search functionality, and integration with Facebook and Twitter – users can broadcast their newly-discovered "hot spots." Given the popularity location sharing is attracting these days, some may go for this.

The app is available for free at Apple’s App Store.

Recently AT&T Interactive also made its Buzz.com social local search product available to the public. Read my interview with the company about that here.

Tellme for mobile provides services like voice to text messaging, voice activated dialing, and voice web search. As Microsoft has released Windows Mobile 6.5, Sprint has launched the SPH-i350 Intrepid from Samsung, which utilizes Tellme to search Bing by voice. The technology is demonstrated in the following video (via Google Watch):

"With more mobile phones than computers in people’s lives, there’s more demand than ever for simple, fast ways to get what you want, when you want it," says TellMe on the company site. "With billions of voice requests interpreted each year, human input improves the accuracy and speed of the Tellme platform to help you do anything on the go."

Google has an iPhone app available (and has for some time) that does essentially the same thing. There are also similar features from Google on Android devices and Blackberries. Google also added voice search to Google Maps on Android phones.

Google’s offering just covers search though. Tellme goes beyond just searching with the aforementioned features. It also has some uses specifically for businesses. Tellme says it brings caller experience, ultra-reliability, future-proof, sound value, and total control to the table. These are all explained in their respective sections here.

"More than simple local business search, Bing 411 makes it easier to get on-the-go information: driving directions, traffic reports, sports scores, stock quotes, weather reports, and even information the cheapest place near you to buy gas," says Yvonne Chou, Senior Program Lead for Bing411.

According to Chou, Bing411 can be called to find a business and connect to it or get a text message with a link to a map, which can also be sent to friends. The service also includes star ratings of businesses based on reviews from other consumers.

Though the service was officially announced today, PC Magazine had an opportunity to review it recently and Mark Hachman with that publication says it doesn’t do a great job of differentiating between actual and sponsored search results.

He compares the service to Google’s 1-800-GOOG-411, and says while Google is actually better in the area mentioned above, Bing is "at least comparable if not slightly superior to what Google has accomplished."

That is certainly an interesting endorsement, especially considering over half of people (from one survey) can imagine using Bing over Google. Meanwhile, Bing has already taken the number 2 spot in search market share according to StatCounter.