bing

If there was an over-hyped technology in late 2011 it was perhaps Apple's Siri, their voice recognition/information application for the iPhone 4s. Now we'll admit that Siri is quite a strong piece of tech one that we wish Windows Phone had built-in in addition to our Bing Voice service, but the marketing machine behind Siri was a tad overwhelming. Then again, there's no denying facts: Bing Voice while pragmatic for certain tasks is still behind Apple's Siri in some ways.

However, developer Shai Leib has given us Windows Phone users an option: Ask Ziggy. The new app is a free, ad-free and as far as we can tell, completely unique. We spoke with Leib about his project and how it works:

"Ask Ziggy uses Speech Recognition to translate human speech into transcribed text, which is displayed in a speech bubble. The transcribed text is analyzed for patterns to detect commands or general queries. Commands are interpreted and routed to routine phone tasks such as emailing, texting, calling, social network updates, and getting directions.

When a general question is asked, a mixture of mash up technologies and web scraping is employed to search the web for relevant responses. Pattern matching is used to summarize a direct answer from a web page. Several passes may be required to find a concise answer. A direct answer is then spoken out loud, and displayed in a speech bubble. When a direct answer cannot be summarized the user is prompted by speech to click on their search bubble to see web search results based on their spoken query."

That's some pretty impressive work for a single developer if you ask us. The actual voice-recognition software is based on Nuance but the data fetching and matching are all his doing. And it works. That's one thing we want to stress here, we didn't find this app gimmicky at all but instead quite useful for mathematical questions, random trivia, posting to our Twitter/Facebook/Live, getting directions, flight status and more. Having the phone read back to you the answer in a clean, minimalist setting makes it feel smart. Heck, it even got our Monty Python question right (see YouTube video).

The version you see in the video is heading to the Marketplace as we speak but you can grab the slightly older version right now. Give it a go--it's free, useful and really quite an extraordinary app. Leib also has a lot of plans to further refine and enhance the experience including expanded speech grammar, multi-language support and even language translations. Check out the Ask Ziggy website here for more info.

Microsoft just scooped up the domain name SkypeSexFinder.com when it recently expired.  While it is likely just a defensive move to prevent others from registering the name, what is fascinating is they are using it.  In the past, such domain names simply pointed to Bing's homepage.  However, in this case, SkypeSexFinder actually takes you to a Bing search for the words.

If you look past the initial results, which are now posts about this story, what you find are some websites that actually facilitate having sexy encounters via Skype and other services.  Chances are that this is a simple oversight on Microsoft's part, and we're thinking they will change it as word gets out.

We chose to leave out the the results page as it originally appeared, but you can see Fusible's snapshot here.

Source: Fusible; Via: WinRumors

This should make some people excited. In Surrey, England Nokia's NAVTEQ car loaded with cameras and sensors on top, was spotted driving around, presumably mapping the terrain.

This is cool for two reasons: one, it says Bing on it, clearly showing the close partnership between Nokia and Microsoft and two, this looks like Nokia may be engaging in some type of NAVTEQ roadview, analogous to Google Street View. The car actually looks a lot like what Google uses to drive around photographing streets in a 360 degree panorama.

Going one step further, it reminds us of this Gizmodo story from 2010, where a similar vehicle had "a mount with seven cameras and 64 lasers to see everything better, in 3D" resulting in the ability to "...scan everything within view, capturing 1.2 million points of data every second. The result is all kinds of terrain data that is not possible using just cameras". Well, that sounds pretty awesome.

We know Nokia and Microsoft have big plans for NAVTEQ but this could mean some Google-level and beyond maps for Windows Phone in 2012. Sign us up!

Update: Yup, looks like it's part of Bing Streetside:

"Microsoft is partnering with NAVTEQ, the leading global provider of digital map, traffic and location data, to collect Streetside imagery. NAVTEQ will use their expertise in efficient data collection to staff and operate the collection vehicles and manage data logistics. Microsoft will apply industry-leading image processing and privacy protection techniques to create data products for both Bing Maps and NAVTEQ commercial customers."

Thanks to Yousuf K., who tipped us the photos using our app!

Comscore has released its latest search share data reports and while Google is still tops, they lost a little ground while Bing experienced slight gains.

For the calendar year, Google's market share has hovered around 66% but from July 2011 to August 2011, the share fell 3%. Bing on the other hand peaked in February at 16.1% and experienced a 3% bump between July and August.

Other key points from the Comscore report includes:

• Month of August 2011: U.S. explicit core search was up 9% y/y for the month of August a deceleration from +10% y/y in July. Google search was up 8.1%, Yahoo! up 2% and Microsoft up 44%.
• September Quarter (Quarter over Quarter) Pacing: We examine how the search quarter is pacing after the second month of the quarter. We define pacing as taking the reported period (month of July and August) and dividing it by the monthly average of the previous quarter. To that end, U.S. explicit core search is pacing up 2.7% q/q for 3QTD (vs. +2.8% as of July), with Google up 1.9%, Yahoo! up 4.7% and Microsoft up 5.2%.

While there is definitely room for improvement, the one positive Microsoft can take away from these reports is that there is some growth and Google's share for the market appears to be stalled. I'd be curious to see how much influence our Windows Phones have on Bing's numbers? As Windows Phones starts to muster larger market shares, could Bing see similar increases?

source: businessinsider