I made a really quick video today, of the way Bing search features work on Windows phone, in the Mango Beta Refresh. Firstly you will see me testing visual search, which is probably the most accurate, recognises words and searches properly. Remember this is just a trial, and real off the cuff look. Visual text recognition works real well, i didn’t have bar or QR codes to test. Voice search is probably more affected by regional settings than we think, and accent. Local search, or GPS based search works as well. Seems the features are not as limited as we first thought. The big downer is voice recognition, and I wonder if there is, a learning curve involved in the OS, There is no function to calibrate language, speech recognition at the moment. You can see at the end of the video, search repeatedly gets simple words wrong, or mistakenly attributes Peter to P.E.T.A. Speaking very deliberately seems to work, but make the feature slower to use, and a bit off putting. Hopefully it does improve with use.
