With the latest update, Microsoft's Bing gets conversational

Ever looked at the search provider as a friend you can actually converse with? Microsoft’s Bing aims to be just that with a conversational feature that understands the context of all your questions.

Microsoft said in a blog post : “For all kinds of searches, Bing lets you ask a question the way you would ask a friend.” For example, you can follow up the question “Which is the tallest building in Mumbai”, with just “How tall is it?” and Bing will tell you the actual height of the building that it brought up in the first search query.

Yan Ke, Principal Development Lead of the Bing Relevance Team added, “By combining conversational understanding with our knowledge repository containing information on billions of people, places and things, you can dive and learn more about a topic or interest.” Though a small update, it’s perhaps the first of its kind in terms of searching on the web by typing it out on the search bar.

Conversational capabilities are common on mobile voice assistants, such as iOS’ Siri, Google Now and Cortana on Windows Phone. Though all of them are powered by search providers, you could never directly type out a search query without first putting it into context on the web or mobile browser. Microsoft has changed that with its latest update and has in fact beaten search-giant Google to it.