Bing Introduces Conversational Search

In an attempt to directly provide answers and continue the conversation at the same time through the search engine, Bing has added conversational search responses to SERPs which enables the site to make the initial search context as its basis for the following relevant queries.

“These improvements build on extensive work we have done to build out the Bing platform including investments in entity and conversational understanding,” says Yan Ke, the Principal Development Lead of Bing Relevance Team.

Bing uses a combination of “conversational understanding” and their huge collection of stored data “on billions of people, places and things”—the idea behind relevant search responses of Google’s Knowledge Graph and Facebook’s Graph Search—to help users learn more about a topic or interest.

For instance, a user types in “who is the president of the united states?” which will be answered immediately by Bing. From there, the user might ask “who is his wife?” or “how tall is he?” With these kinds of search responses, Bing maintains a conversational flow of queries where searchers are allowed to ask questions without entering repetitive information.

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On the flipside, while many have tried using Bing’s new conversational search feature, those outside of the USA were not able to get the same response. Making conversational search available in other parts of the world should be the next goal that Bing strives for. “This is a long journey, and we expect to deliver a number of additional improvements in the days ahead,” says Yan Ke.

Bing’s new feature is a closer desktop version of Microsoft’s Cortana, the “intelligent personal assistant and knowledge navigator for Windows Phone,” which accesses its intelligence from Bing. This newly announced feature of Microsoft is currently only limited to mobile devices. With this recently added feature on search, Bing users are going to experience conversational search on their PCs as close to Cortana’s capability to maintain conversations with users.

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