Microsoft’s search engine is once again following Google’s lead, adding new conversational search capabilities.
You may recall, Google announced its version over a year ago, and has slowly made improvements to it in the meantime. In May, for example, the “Ok, Google” feature became available for all Chrome users in the U.S.
Yan Ke, Principal Development Lead for the Bing Relevance Team says, “For all kinds of searches, Bing lets you ask a question the way you would ask a friend. For example, ‘who is the President of the United States’ or ‘the tallest building in the world’, or ‘who played Morpheus in The Matrix’, Bing will show the most pertinent information about Barack Obama, Burj Khalifa in Dubai and Lawrence Fishburne. So, by combining conversational understanding with our knowledge repository containing information on billions of people, places and things, you can dive and learn more about a topic or interest.”
“Today we’re taking it a step further,” says Ke. “Now, not only will give you the answer directly in the search results, but we will also continue the conversation. For instance, you can ask ‘who is the president of the united states’, we will show you the answer. From there you might ask, “who is his wife” or “how tall is he.” Bing maintains the context and keeps the conversation moving forward.”
The company didn’t say anything about saying, “OK, Bing.” They did say we can expect additional improvements in the coming days.
Image via Microsoft