Ludicrous speed: Bing Voice now 2x as fast, 15% more accurate on Windows Phone

Back in March, upcoming changes to the backend of Bing and its voice capabilities (aka TellMe) were revealed with the promise that those improvements were coming to all Windows Phones. Those changes included significantly faster searches, more accurate transcription and improved accuracy in noisy environments.

Microsoft has just let it out that these changes are now official. That means if you pick up your Windows Phone right now and try to transcribe a text message or do a voice Bing Search, you should noticed the improvements. As these updates come from Microsoft’s servers, there is no OS update needed.

Indeed we’re told that searches are now twice as fast as before with an increase of 15% for accuracy. If you watch our video above of it in action, it is quite fast—dare we say almost instant. It’s so fast now, we’re actually re-thinking our usage of this function, which up until this point has fallen into the novelty category for us.

What about you? Notice the improvements? Will you be using Bing voice search and transcription more often? Let us know in comments!

Source: Inside Microsoft Research

Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central. He is also the head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007, when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and watches. He has been reviewing laptops since 2015 and is particularly fond of 2-in-1 convertibles, ARM processors, new form factors, and thin-and-light PCs. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.