MobilityMinded » bing

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

Remo Knops — Wed, 12 May 2010 10:15:42 +0000

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.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BJlv6doAJY

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:

The number of supported Windows Phones is limited, since a list with models is provided in the blogpost;
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.

Microsoft Live Search for Windows Mobile transforms into Bing

Johan van Mierlo — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:18:06 +0000

Microsoft just released a new Bing application for Windows Mobile. It is replacing the already familiar Microsoft Live Search application for Windows Mobile.

The application is available for download directly from your device. Just point your mobile browser to http://m.bing.com/download or you can download the windows mobile installation file (.cab) here directly.

Currently the new Bing application is only avaialble for Windows Mobile 2003, 2003 SE 5 and 6. The Bing application offers support for United States, United Kingdom, France and Italy. However I have it installed on my 6.1 device as well.

Blackberry users still can download the Live Search application here.

So far this is simply a re-branding of the Live Search app to match the web based Bing . New functionality is expected later this year.

Click for larger image

Bing a Google search alternative described as decision engine ??

Remo Knops — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:05:54 +0000

I was pleasently surprised when I first heard about the new decision engine Bing, in times when the verb “to Google” being included in the dictionaries as a description to search something on the world wide web. What happened to Microsoft Live Search and what is a decision engine ? Background information on the bing.com website states:

“We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world calss search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.” [ref01]

Personally I truly like the idea that Microsoft wants to deliver an experience beyond just search. Honestly the Google-search-engine does its job very well, it even has market shares of 70% (and more in some countries), and in that respet it’s hard to change your habits. You need to offer something more and something better: -a different experience, rather than just search-.

According to the interview on yahoo finance it’s very hard to quantify or measure the “amount of being better”, in order that people want to change their habits.

Kedrosky says: “You’re trying to replace a product people are reasonably happy with, with something where it’s not clear what the quantum improvement is.” [ref04]

However you can look at the problem from two sides: (1) a comparison with Google search, and (2) the improvement over the current Live Search. Personally I do think that Bing is a significant improvement over the current Microsoft Live Search, simply because it offers more inter-connected searches.

Images

With one search term, for example HTC Touch Pro2, you can quickly search images, get only shopping tips, or find news items about the search term. The screenshot above shows in the images “tab” options to filter on size, layout, or color in order to narrow down your search more easily. Let’s zoom in on some of the added features described on the bing.com website as:

Shopping

“Features like cashback, where we actually give you money back on great products, and price predictor, which actually tells you when to buy an airline ticket in order to help get you the best price – help you make smarter decisions, and put money back in your pocket.” [ref01]

I truly like the concept, since I now use different price-comparison websites in order to search for the optimal pricepoint for the device or item I want to purchase. The challenge however is to get those locale, national and international price comparison websites onboard of the Bing-ship. In that case it certainly can save you some money, and I’m really curious about the pricepredictor and other services. I furthermore want to remark that I just put in one search term, and simply switched “tabs” to get acces to different types of information.

xRank

A final highlight I want to mention is the so called xRank, which is an overview list of celebrities with rises and drops of stars based on the results of search queries. The cool thin is that it not only shows the lists, and search volumes, but it gathers also information about the artist: (1) biography, (2) videos, (3) images. In fact this is the only “tab” within Bing where I see the connection with video content.

Some thoughts and considerations

Let me start to remark that Bing is currently still in technically beta-status, so I guess there is still room for improvement and finetuning. However in the first concept I like the inter-connected search options, and the idea of quickly switching between different types of information all about one search topic.

Furthermore I certainly like the idea that Microsoft is trying to go beyond the idea of just “searching”, and offer additional “services”. Compared to the current Microsoft Live services, there seems to be a large expansion in addtional offering. Microsoft is cerntainly trying to create value for the end-user, and I do believe that there is potential in the price-comparison website integration. I just received word that you can download a bing add-on for Internet Explorer 8 over here !

Also the mobile website is up and running already, please have a look at Todd Ogasawara’s article @ Mobile Content Today and Jack Cook’s article @ Experience Mobility for additional information about the mobile version.

However there are also aspects to consider, like the impact of realtime information flows with services like Twitter or other social networks.

“Live data pouring in on a real-time basis – a fire hose of data,” is both compelling for users and a “very different thing architecturally” from how search is currently structured [...]” [ref04]

Furthermore I think, despite the fact that I’m not a www-expert, that it will be a challenge to get the price comparison websites onboard and offer them a piece of the value in the value chain. Also I don’t see expansion in the video-direction, while there is a lot of anticipated growth and increasing ammount of video content, which is uploaded onto the web.

Despite some question marks I think you always need to be open to explore new things. Therefore give Bing a try, look at the nice and daily changing back ground image, and follow the upcomming developments. If it will become the beacon on the web, just like the Batman light beacon in the Batman movies, we all don’t know. Read some additional articles of Todd Bishop about Bing @ the Techflash website, and Mike Temporale’s early writings about this new services @ MobileJaw (part 1) (part 2) !!

What are your ideas, thoughts and experiences of the recently launched decision engine called Bing ? Give the beta a try and let us know, what you think or what could be improved ??