Xbox, Bing – Deliver Me a Whole New Way to Search

When we watched Star Trek decades ago, the idea of talking to a computer seemed like pure science fiction. Fast forward to the present and your voice has replaced the remote control for your living room with Xbox One, an all-in-one games and entertainment system with sophisticated voice navigation and natural language voice search powered by Bing and Kinect. In addition to combining games, music, movies, and live TV into one amazing device, every Xbox One utilizes the power of Bing and Kinect to make it fast, easy and natural to find, play, watch, and listen to whatever you want.

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Bing makes finding the entertainment you want easier than ever on Xbox One. Whether your game, show, song or movie is in an app, on your console, or in our own Xbox Music or Xbox Video, the same instant search technology that powers Bing web search also brings your entertainment results together beautifully on your TV.

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Xbox entertainment is growing from hundreds of thousands of pieces of content to millions.   With all of the rich content options available today also comes complexity – most of us have a hard time finding the entertainment we’re looking for without paging through screens and screens of menus and switching between different programs. You have games, movies, music, TV shows and apps including services like Netflix and Hulu. By marrying great content with the power of Bing’s voice technology and the magic of Kinect, we’re able to provide instant access to an ever expanding universe of content options. Voice search works across media types and across apps so you can focus on deciding what to enjoy rather than where and how to find it. You say it, Xbox One finds it.

Check out Major Nelson showing it off:

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Upgrade Your TV

Our relationship with our TVs has historically been a one way street. We watch our shows and movies but the experience is largely about taking things in rather than a true interaction. Bing voice technology and Kinect on Xbox One changes all that. Now you can not only interact with your entertainment and gaming experiences with the sound of your voice, but you can also control and navigate the entire system. From turning on the console (“Xbox, on”) to launching a game (“Xbox, go to Forza Motorsport 5”) to initiating a Skype call with your buddy (“Xbox, Skype, John”), we have upgraded your status with your TV to “in a relationship.”

Over the past few years, we’ve built the power of Bing into products across Microsoft. Whether you’re using Windows Phone, Office, Windows 8, or soon Xbox One, we’ve made it easier to find the stuff you are looking for and do something with it. With the worldwide availability of Windows 8.1 we introduced a whole new way to search with Bing Smart Search. Now with Xbox One, we’re following suit with a redefined way to search with your voice.

Just Say What You Want

Over the past few years, we’ve focused on overcoming limitations of previous voice experiences. To achieve speed and accuracy improvements, we focused on an advanced approach called Deep Neural Networks(DNNs). DNN is a technology that is inspired by the functioning of neurons in the human brain. In a similar way, DNN technology can detect patterns akin to the way biological systems recognize patterns allowing us to better understand natural language. With Xbox One, you can search using natural phrases. For instance, you can say:

  • “I feel like watching comedy movies from the 1980’s”
  • “Show me popular dubstep music”
  • “I want to watch the movie Star Trek Into Darkness”
  • “I want to play Forza Motorsport”

With an arsenal of over 300,000 servers powering the back-end of Xbox One, the system is learning and adapting every day so as the vast expanse of the digital entertainment and services continues to morph at record speeds, the experience will continue to get better.

– Stefan Weitz, Senior Director, Bing