Microsoft Updates Bing To Be ‘More Conversational’

Microsoft has updated its Bing search engine so users can continue their searches with follow up questions posed in a natural language.

Until now, Bing has responded to questions like “Who is the president of the United States” by returning relevant information, such as details about Barack Obama.

Now, users can continue that conversation by typing in queries such as “who is his wife” or “how tall is he,” and Bing will return answers based on its database of billions of people, places and things.

Bing conversations

“These improvements build on extensive work we have done to build out the Bing platform including investments in entity and conversational understanding,” says Yan Ke, principal development lead of the Bing Relevance Team. “This is a long journey, and we expect to deliver a number of additional improvements in the days ahead.”

The update brings Bing closer to Microsoft’s voice-activated personal assistant Cortana, which has been released on Windows Phone. Cortana understands voice and text commands to perform smartphone tasks or search the web in a similar manner to Siri on iOS or Google Now on Android.

Bing is Microsoft’s most recent attempt to secure a share of the search market dominated by Google which replaced the ill-fated Live Search in 2009.

According to ComScore figures, Bing currently conducts 18.8 percent of all searches in the US, significantly less than Google’s 67.6 percent, although it is worth pointing out that Yahoo search, which is powered by Bing, accounts for ten percent.

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