Bing Helps Developers Connect More Naturally With People

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is central to our ambitions as a company. Through this intelligence, we want to empower everyone to achieve more. Central to that mission is leveraging the knowledge of Bing and the services that Bing has created to make knowledge accessible and usable by all.
 
In this first post on how Bing technology is being used by developers across the industry, we touch upon our work to enable more natural and conversational experiences that are designed around people.
 
Today we are witnessing a shift towards a more natural, conversational computing. While this shift is still very early, and evolving, many groups are already seeing opportunities – from developers who view this as the new platform to create on with bots, to businesses who see a new way to connect with customers, and individuals who are eager for more natural ways to discover, access and interact digitally.
 
Our services continue to evolve through our direct experience delivering new intelligent experiences at scale. Our popular chatbots Xiaoice in China and Rinna in Japan already have more than 90 million users. Built using Bing technology, users have formed strong emotional connections with Xiaoice. Cortana, the more productive personal digital assistant, again built upon Bing services, is used globally by more than 133 million people each month.
 
Beyond Microsoft’s first party experiences, we focus on applying Bing technology to create building blocks for developers to understand the user (intents, contexts, disambiguation), extract knowledge (insights, facts, information) and intelligence (natural language, safe search). Below are just a couple of examples.
 
A search engine is traditionally known for its vast index of the web, a digital map of the planet, complete index of public images, videos, and all the news you ever wanted. Ask it anything, and you typically get back useful information that answers your query across all these domains.
 
Bing additionally has a multi-domain knowledge graph. To put our knowledge graph into perspective, think about a person, place, or thing—say a sports team. That sports team has a name, upcoming game schedule, a team roster with individual player statistics, news, pictures, videos, maps to the venues they play, and weather forecasts for the days they will be playing. All this information is associated with that one sports team, which, in our knowledge graph, is one node/entity. And we have billions—all interlinked to each other so they can be conversationally traversed to bring knowledge into experiences, including conversations.
 

   

 

The Bing Sportscaster bot on Facebook Messenger taps into Bing’s knowledge and intelligence to keep users up-to-date with news, facts, scores, schedules and more about their favorite teams.
 
When we launched Bing, we recognized the value of integrating deep smarts and controls into our search stack, to enable experiences which work better for people.
 
One example is image analysis and the safe search settings that are valued by parents and educators. We apply our ability to use AI to detect and filter out inappropriate search results, both explicit adult and racy content. We offer this capability to developers as part of our Bing Search API.
 


This is just a taste of the capabilities that we make available to developers. Developers and businesses are using Bing services right now to build new natural and conversational experiences for people.
 
It is an exciting time to be working to enable this changing technology landscape.
 
In our next post for this series, we will take a deeper look at how Bing Search APIs help power our partners’ solutions.
 
For more information on the services we make available to power chatbots, apps and new business opportunities, please visit our partner website or contact us. We are always happy to connect!
 
Check out some of our posts from the past for more information about Bing services:

- The Bing Team