You are here: Home / Phones / Windows Phone / Bing for Windows Phone – Tellme returns in Bing Maps turn-by-turn navigation

Bing for Windows Phone – Tellme returns in Bing Maps turn-by-turn navigation

May 12, 2010 By 1 Comment
| | Share the knowledge |

Yesterday Microsoft announced on the Microsoft Bing community blog an updated version of Bing for Windows Phone, specifically intended for Windows Mobile 6.x devices.

New features in Bing for Windows Phone

In the screenshots above you can see the old and the new main screen of the Bing application for Windows Phone side-by-side. At first you can see the new background, just like it is the case when you visit the Bing website from your Windows powered desktop or notebook.

“The first is a redesign to the home page. We changed the navigation to give people faster access to common searches, such as Movies and Traffic.”
The navigation menu is group together at the bottom area of the screen, which is a clever positioning for one-handed use on a device like the HTC HD2. Furthermore you can see the command speak on the left softkey, that allows you to do searches by voice command.

After you hit the left softkey Speak, you get a screen with the text “listening” which is the moment to tell the Bing application for Windows Phone your search item. I told the Bing application to search for MobilityMinded, and the next step is the screen with the text “thinking” like you can see above.

Probably due to my terrible English accent, Bing for Windows Phone wasn’t sure what search I wanted to perform and asked me to select the best option of a few close alternatives. Of course I was searching for MobilityMinded, with a direct search result on top of the page. :)

“The second feature is turn-by-turn navigation for Windows 6.x phones, powered by Bing Maps. If you have a Windows phones on Sprint, T-Mobile, or AT&T you can use the voice guided navigation.”
When you select the directions menu item from the navigation menu on the main screen of Bing for Windows Phone, you get a first screen in which you need to enter the start and end location. Let me first speak up the start location, by hitting the right softkey with the Speak command.

In the example I want to get directions from the Microsoft campus in Redmond to the Space Needle in Seattle. There are two options you can choose from: (1) Directions, or (2) Navigate. In the right screenshot above you can see the result of the directions screen, which is a description how to drive.

The second new feature however is this turn-by-turn navigation, which I unfortunately can’t test since I’m not living in the USA. You probably want to check out the video below of Adam Lein, Editor of PocketNow, in which he takes the Bing for Windows Phone navigation for a test-drive.

The return of Tellme in Bing Maps turn-by-turn navigation

You might remember the article “Tellme Microsoft’s One Button Voice Access Application Managing Mobile Communications and Information“, which has been published on this website about a year ago. It was unclear what the status was of the Tellme project, was it just a research experiment, or was the project killed, or was it continued.

“We took advantage of the Microsoft Tellme team’s expertise in voice applications to deliver an amazingly lifelike voice experience for the turn-by-turn navigation.”

With the announcement of the Bing application for Windows Phone I learned that the Tellme experience is used in the turn-by-turn navigation powered by Bing Maps. It is great to hear that the Tellme technology is applied in other products.

Joel Evans, Editor of The Mobile Gadgeteer ZDNet blog has published an excellent article recently “Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Tellme” in which he has been informed about implementations of the Tellme technology. As you can see in the list, Bing for Windows Phone is one of the options.

Concluding thoughts

My compliments for the improvements in Bing for Windows Phone, and getting a more unified experience on each of the three-screens-and-a-cloud ! Furthermore there is a more touch optimized interface now, and the few voice command tests I’ve done with Bing for Windows Phone gave good results.

In the announcement on the Microsoft Community Blog there are also a few limitations addressed:

  1. The number of supported Windows Phones is limited, since a list with models is provided in the blogpost;
  2. The turn-by-turn navigation is only supported in the USA and not in other parts of the world;

Actually this limited availability and support is the part that worries me the most, since the global market is much more than just the USA. As a result I wasn’t able to test the turn-by-turn navigation !

Another example in this context is the Zune pass, which is almost impossible to use outside of the USA, and I really hope that this will change in the Windows Phone 7 time-frame.

Not only Zune but also Bing for Windows Phone will be experiences that are closely tied to Windows Phone 7, based on the demo’s I have seen @ MWC 2010 and MIX ’10. So global support of features will become key for end-user experience !

Finally it is great to see that the Tellme technology is used in several different applications across the Windows Phone platform. If Tellme will be integrated with Windows Phone 7 is not clear, despite the efforts of Joel Evans to get an official statement in his article on The Mobile Gadgeteer ZDNet Blog.


Filed Under: Windows Phone Tagged With: , ,