14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced a new major improvement for Bing, that allows the search engine to have a conversation with anyone looking for information online.
This new feature, which pushes the Bing search engine closer to Cortana, is now available to everyone using the US version of the service, but it could become available worldwide in the coming days.
Basically, all you need to do to try it out is to write down a question on Bing and then continue the conversation with another question about the result that you’re provided with.
If that doesn’t make much sense to you, Microsoft has another explanation that also includes some examples:
“Today we’re taking it a step further. 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 said.
“These improvements build on extensive work we have done to build out the Bing platform including investments in entity and conversational understanding. This is a long journey, and we expect to deliver a number of additional improvements in the days ahead.”
While at this point the new Bing feature is only working with text that you write down in the search box, expect the same options to be available to those who wish to use voice commands exclusively, most likely with the help of Cortana.
At this point, Cortana the personal assistant can also perform searches online using Bing, but you cannot yet have a conversation based on the results you receive. Everything is most likely just a matter of time until this becomes possible on Cortana as well, especially as the company continues to work on improvements for this particular service.
Cortana is also expected to arrive on the desktop sometime in the near future, with people close to the matter indicating that Windows 9, the next full Windows release prepared for April 2015, could come with at least a preview version of the desktop flavor of Cortana. Nothing is confirmed as of now, but given the fact that Microsoft is now trying to make us have a conversation with a search engine, those days when we’re going to talk with our PCs are not that far.