Bing launches new intelligent search features, powered by AI

One of the Intelligent Search features announced today are Intelligent Answers. These answers leverage the latest state of the art in machine reading comprehension, backed by Project Brainwave running on Intel’s FPGAs, to read and analyze billions of documents to understand the web and help you more quickly and confidently get the answers you need.
 
Bing now uses deep neural networks to validate answers by aggregating across multiple reputable sources, rather than just one, so you can feel more confident about the answer you’re getting. 

Many times, you have to click into multiple sources to get a comprehensive answer for your question. Bing now saves you time by bringing together content from across multiple sources. 

Of course, not every question has just one answer. Sometimes you might be looking for expert opinions, different perspectives or collective knowledge. If there are different authoritative perspectives on a topic, such as benefits vs drawbacks, Bing will aggregate the two viewpoints from reputable sources and intelligently surface them to you on the top of the page to save you time.  

If there are multiple ways to answer a question, you’ll get a carousel of intelligent answers, saving you time searching from one blue link to another. 

We’re also expanding our comparison answers beyond just products, so you can get a snapshot of the key differences between two items or topics in an easy-to-read table. Bing’s comparison answers understand entities, their aspects, and using machine reading comprehension, reads the web to save you time combing through numerous dense documents to find what you are looking for. 

Bing also leverages technology built in Microsoft’s research labs to help make sense of numbers we increasingly encounter in the digital world. Bing translates this data into simple concepts so it’s easier to understand what data like the population of another country means.

Many of these answers are available today and others will be rolling out to users over the next week in the US with expansion to other markets over time.

A key element of Intelligent Search is bringing together different sources of knowledge, like the wisdom of the crowd, to help people make decisions. Today, we’re launching a new partnership with Reddit, an online community of 330M monthly active users, to bring information from the Reddit community, which generates 2.8M comments daily, to Bing. We are launching with three initial experiences, which we’ll continue to develop and expand as we get feedback from users: 

 

We often hear that search would be easier if only Bing could complete your sentences. Half the battle of searching is knowing the right words to query. Combining our expertise in web scale mining of billions of documents and with Conversational AI, we're creating a new way to search that is interactive and can build on your previous searches to get you the best answer. Now if you need help figuring out the right question to ask, Bing will help you with clarifying questions based on your query to better refine your search and get you the best answer the first time around. You’ll start to see this experience in health, tech and sports queries, and we will be adding more topic areas over time. And because we’ve built it with large-scale machine learning, the experience will get better over time as more users engage with it.   

 

Today, we also shared more detail on Bing’s advanced image search features. Bing Image Search leverages computer vision and object recognition to give you more ways to find what you’re looking for. Search any image or within images to shop for fashion or home furniture.  Bing detects and highlights different products within images or you can click the magnifying glass icon on the top right of any image to search within an image and find related images or products. We also previewed a new feature that helps you better explore the world around you. If you find a landmark on Bing image search or use a photo from your camera roll, Bing will identify it and share interesting information about that landmark, such as the origins of the landmark and other relevant trivia. For instance, if you are looking at the India Gate, Bing can tell you why it was created and even what kind of stone it was made from. More to come on this feature in the future.

We’re excited for you to try out all of Bing’s new Intelligent Search features and are committed to delivering even more features that will help to save you time and money in the future. To learn more about Intelligent Search visit our site here.

-The Bing Team