The Bing search capabilities baked into Windows Phone already let you speak your search queries, but the next release, dubbed Mango, will allow you to identify music that’s being played in the area, and find pertinent album and artist info. Microsoft first mentioned Bing Audio last month, but didn’t give much in the way of details about it.
If you’ve ever used Shazam or the like, you’ll know where Bing Audio is coming from. According to a recent interview embedded below, Microsoft will be handling things a little bit differently from established players. Instead of waiting for a full 15-second clip to be recorded and sent off to servers to be analyzed, Bing Audio will continually be sending music to the server, which will return a match as soon as one is found. Apparently doing things this way can produce results much more quickly. Microsoft is also already well-established in the Music world thanks to Zune, so users will have more than 10 million tracks to scan against. The usual stuff, like search history and album art will also be included, but unfortunately it doesn’t work with humming like Soundhound does.
Windows Phone Mango will have over 500 new features in it, prominently including multitasking, Twitter and LinkedIn integration, as well as a visual search using the phone’s camera to go along with Bing Audio. It’ll be a big update, but there’s definitely some worry that including features like this steps on the toes of established app developers. On the other hand, one can only encourage Microsoft in giving people what they want.
[via Channel 9]