Microsoft shows off the power of voice and Bing on Xbox One, shows what could come to Windows Phone

By Sam Sabri
published

Microsoft’s Bing is so much more than a web search engine. Earlier this summer at Build 2013, we learned how Bing was evolving into a platform of its own. Bing is also becoming a technology that’s going to help power some cool technology that will integrate across all your devices. When you open your Xbox One this Friday you’ll also see Bing doing some impressive features with your voice. Watch the video below with Xbox Live’s Major Nelson to see it in action.

Using your voice and Bing to search for content and get things done on the Xbox One is going to be a lot more natural. You’ll notice in the video above that the statements Larry made weren’t as rigid as we’ve seen with commands on Windows Phone in the past.

How’s this possible? Xbox Live, Bing, and other various services tied to the Xbox One are powered by over 300,000 servers. The ability for the Xbox One to listen to natural commands via voice is possible to the research Microsoft has done into Deep Neural Networks (DNN). DNNs allow for speed and accuracy by creating networks that are similar to the neurons in a human brain. Over time, the DNN learns to detect patters in a similar way that we, as biological systems, do.

Here are some of the conversational commands used in the video after saying “Xbox, Bing”.

“Show me popular Sci-fi movies from the 90’s”“Show me action-adventure games”“I want to download Forza Motorsport”“I feel like watching the movie Star Trek: Into Darkness”

Saying any of those commands brings up search results or takes you to an action you want to do. For example, you end up on the Forza Motorsport game page where you can buy the video game after telling Xbox and Bing you want to download it. Pretty cool stuff and definitely a feature that we can easily see coming to both Windows Phone and Windows 8.

This Friday we’ll get to see just how conversation these commands are when we get our hands on with the Xbox One.

Source: Xbox (opens in new tab)

73 Comments
  • I don't think voice command will be available in other languages. (I want in Portuguese-BR)
  • I'm brazilian too and I also want that in here. I listened and I saved the "some of the things that Bing helps to bring to life on EVERY Xbox One". Let's just hope, but I'm with you (doubt it will be avaliable everywhere).
  • oh, you can't say "Lindo Windows"?
  • It is available on EVERY Xbox One, you just need to speak to it in English... I'm joking, but I'm sure they will have mutli-language support.
  • Español! Is the largest language over the world! I hope support for multi language too,, like on my lumia
  • Incorrect, that would be Chinese. ;).
  • Incoreect, Chinese is not a language ;)
  • lol
  • We never get these types of pleasure. Take Siri as an example.
  • Maybe we'll get something better like Cortana?
  • Oh yeah! I always forget about Cortana.
  • I agree. I speak Portuguese too and id hate to see any language left out
  • ...and Portuguese (PT)
  • YES! On WP there's only Portuguese BR and it's frustrating because sometimes it won't understand what i say :P
  • I use voice command on my WP with portuguese-BR and always understand what I say. I think this is a great service. Never let me down.
  • I don't know about it. Using my voice search on WP very occasionally. And even though English isn't my native language, I always thought that im pretty good in it. Untill all these voice searches Siri, google and bla bla bla came in and I felt a lot like Kripke from The Big Bang theory. Now its just so much fun seeing those things misinterpretate whatever I'm saying.
  • basically you are going to have a virtual friend on your phone :D
  • Yay!
  • Haha. I like this idea. Not going to be bored if I am back early from my college without any of my roommate at home.
  • SNAP!!!! I am REALLY excited to do the jump from PS3 to XBox One more and more everyday when I see features such as these. Keep'em coming MS.
  • Welcome tu XBONE
  • cortana is coming
  • They're always showing what they could do, but it would be nice to actually see them do something.. Implement something.. As far as WP is concerned... Should've thrown that in there.. Lol.
  • Pretty sure that was an uncut live retail demo.....
  • Get a Xbox One and you will be able to do this ;)
  • This IS them dong something. This is an actual Xbox One demo
  • Yeah, but I'm talking about WP❕ Even the title of the article says that it shows what COULD come to WP.. We've seen a lot of ideas about what could come to WP, but less have actually been implemented... WP8.1 needs more than 1 innovative feature to set it aside, and above, the competition.. Something exclusive to WP that other smartphones can't do..
  • Well, first of all, this isn't a windows phone article, so the comment makes no sense. Secondly, combine this Xbox demo with leaks of Cortana and I think there is a very high likelihood this is coming to 8.1. Microsoft said they wouldn't do an evolutionary siri competitor, but a revolutionary one. I think we're seeing evidence of that now. Patience my friend. I think MS has the best ecosystem out there and we're seeing more and more of it come to light with each of their product releases.
  • Wrong. This is a WP related article. WP Is mentioned in the title, and the article mentions why this is relative to WP. I'm just commenting on that part of the article, and it's perfectly valid.. And, You're not telling me anything that I don't already know.. I'm sure you don't know about how in tune I am with the platform because your trying to school me on the obvious.. My point isn't to say that I don't have faith in the platform, or that I'm running out of patience.. Lol. You don't know who you're dealing with if that's your perception of me.. Rather, I have seen a lot of great ideas come out of MS research that have not yet cone into fruition.. That's something that I see as an issue, and I'm sorry if you don't agree with that, but you're entitled to your own opinion.. Nevertheless, I might be the biggest WP fan in the world, but I'm not stupid, and brain washed enough to not be able to accept constructive criticism about it.. Speculating whether new features are to come, and actually using new features are two totally different things.. None of what you mentioned has even been officially confirmed by MS, and although I do agree that most likely you are right in your guess, I still have to look at the many past missed opportunities that WP has missed.. It's really no big deal, but in order for WP to keep moving forward we need to see something special not only from Nokia's side but also from the WP teams as well.. And, you have to admit that it's been a long time since anything really exciting has been revealed..
  • Have to stop hitting your head boss.
  • That's pretty sick.
  • Good, things like this were initiated in Google some years back. Microsoft is only a little behind the innitiative but it benefits from the fact that it has loads more devices. It is now Google which is late in  marking presence in Desktop devices and a really credible word processor etc. GO MICROSOFT :D
  • MS has been perfecting its voice control systems for awhile now. They went commercial before anybody with the Ford SYNC system, to my knowledge. Their systems are much more refined than any of the competitors which is what you're going to see come to fruition with the XBone (yes, the XBone, deal with it)
  • They even have realtime voice translation working at 80% accuracy now... which is amazing!
  • Awesome. Now, just change the command from "XBOX" to "Cortana", and I'll be happy.
  • Lord knows that when i say xbox right now with the current gen kinect it never gets it right.
  • I'll be impressed if they get it to work with Scottish accents!
  • Just give it a rub with a bit of Irn Bru and it'll come good.
  • Funny note, I had changed my Windows Phone language from US English to British English and it started announcing with a British accent. The only problem was that it wouldn't recognize my wife's name unless I pronounced it with a British accent. I had to change it back!
  • Eleven!
  • Achhboochs shoo me nooo geeemz.
  • Hopefully Australia's voice commands aren't too limited, I know "Xbox on" won't work... But I wonder what else their missing :(
  • Great stuff. But when it comes to search results Google is still way ahead of Bing.
     
  • In your opinion...
  • Yes of course - and my opinioin if full of wisdom ;-)
  • Opinions are like assholes, we all have one!!
  • Thank you for this brilliant and tasteful comment.
  • +920 hahahaha can't stop laughing!
     
  • Not really. If you do an objective comparison of the results themselves, you'll see Bing and google almost always have the same top 5 results. You might think google is still better at obscure searches, but in the last year or two, I've found that not to be the case, at least not for my technical programming related searches. I've found if Bing doesn't have the answer, neither does google.
  • Bing has been getting better over the years, no doubt about that. Actually I'd welcome Bing becoming a real rival for Google because competition is always good. But i still get the impression - I'm not searching for technical stuff btw. - that Google provides a deeper and wider result.
  • I'm sorry but in my experience for everyday search google is still way ahead. Here is my classic example http://goo.gl/Y4uhx2 For the record I hope bing does improve and together with these voice commands we enter a new era of choice in search engines. 
  • Correct if, and only if, you're in the US. I find Bing often returns very poor results compared to Google. It's exceptionally bad on WP7 for me... Sometimes returning no results AT ALL while Google returns millions for the same search criteria. I'm positive MS are aware of this, which is why they exclude (most? all?) non-US people from taking the Bing Challenge.
  • This is exactly why it would be a bad move to sell off the Bing division!
  • And the reason why that rumor was FUD.
  • Great, but I don't what to shout at my phone (per your idea that this will make it to Windows Phone).  I can type just as fast
  • Are you typing while your driving? How about maybe when you're cutting your grass and don't want to stop what you're doing to pull your phone out of your pocket to type something? And who said anything about shouting? This seemed pretty conversational to me.
  • Wow, your a good typer then. I can speak way faster than I can type. And after the update a few months back, I've found bing voice on WP to be so much faster and accurate.
  • Honestly I like voice search in WP8. Find "X." Usually the first link will be to the closest store or whatever X is and you click it to open up Nokia Drive to X. I find people usually say superfluous things with Siri using complex sentence structure and the results come out totally off base. WP8 forces simple commands, which actually end up better from a results standpoint.
  • I do as well, I just wish more apps would use the voice function. Like hey DJ or tvshow etc.
  • WP already has usable coverage for voice commands, it's full-blown Win that sucks arse here, it's still using the voice command system from XP.  
  • Wrong, Windows is using the voice command system from Vista. XP never had native support for voice commands.
  • Ok but it still really sucks.
  • I hope they do the same thing for doing things on your phone like play rock music
  • I'm so excited about the One, I keep checking my Amazon pre order placed in July. Two more days!!
  • I am sure UPS is starting to hate me. I have been refreshing my shipping status about every hour. Said it was being delivered by 3pm today, I knew that was bs. Come on Friday!!!
  • CORTAANAAAA!!!
  • +117
  • Will it works this time? We have been hearing a lot of stuff about voice control and stuff over the years. But I've never found a fully convincing solution - not in my car, not on my pc. And even Siri is not as perfect as Apple wants its customers to believe.
  • I use it pretty well on Kinect 1, I have to imagine 2 is better, as shown in the video. The only time Kinect 1 struggles is if I have something playing on the tv and it can't hear me. "Xbox pause...dammit. XBOX PAUSE" Then I grab the remote....
  • Typing is just way faster and with a 100% succes rate. On WP you must hold the windows key for 3 seconds which feels awfully long, and then you must hope for the love of god that it will understand you. When it misunderstands, then you are even more fucked in terms of time efficiency. You'll have to undo stuff or delete faulty notes - if you were taking a note for example - and start all over. The success rate is so low in all my experiences with voice commands on any system. I seriously doubt MS can change that. Sure maybe a little improvement, but that's not enough for me. But if they do get it right, it's seriously revolutionary. But I'm. 100% sure it won't be.
  • need indonesian language
  • No way anyone can simply "kill" all of this.
  • Get ready for Cortana :D
    Lets see how this will work in other languages.
    Xbox, Ich hab Lust "Star Trek: Into Darkness" zu gucken.