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
