As previously reported, Apple unveiled some new Siri features for iOS 7 today at its Worldwide Developers Conference. Among them is some new Bing integration, which will see Bing delivering web results when people search with Siri, and it doesn’t have a direct answer for the user.
Bing Corporate Vice President Derrick Connell took to the Bing blog this afternoon to weigh in on the announcement. He wrote:
Starting this fall with iOS 7, Bing will power Siri’s new integrated web search. When users ask Siri a question either the specific answer or web search links will now be delivered automatically so users can find information even faster.
Bing was designed from the outset to be a great place for web search helping customers quickly find what they are looking for and get more out of search. We are thrilled that all the great results people have come to know and love on Bing.com will now be available to Siri users on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
Making sure customers can have access to the power of Bing where and when they need it has been a big focus of the work we have done over the past few years, and we are excited to work with Apple to deliver it to Siri users this fall.
Apple did not make any indication that Bing will become the default search provider on the iPhone, replacing Google in Safari. Neither Apple or Microsoft specified whether Siri will be able to switch between Bing or other search engines with Settings adjustments.
Either way, this is great news for Bing, which can only gain searches from this partnership, which should nicely complement its Facebook partnership, where it provides web results for Graph Search (which has still yet to completely roll out to users).
Siri also has new Twitter search capabilities and Wikipedia integration, making it a more viable competitor to Google’s conversational search and Knowledge Graph (which draws a great deal from Wikipedia itself).