Windows Phone 7 updates Bing to find music and barcodes, provide turn-by-turn directions and send speech-to-text SMS?
Developers are getting plenty of toys alongside Windows Phone 7's "Mango" release, but there may be extra baubles for regular users, too -- Microsoft will reportedly add a few features to Bing in the near future which could prove particularly useful. According to the latest episode of the Windows Phone Dev Podcast -- which hosted Microsoft's Brandon Watson as a guest -- a new function called Bing Audio will act like a Shazam for recognizing music (and will sell you Zune tracks) while Bing Vision will use your smartphone's camera to read barcodes and do optical character recognition, plus potentially provide support for augmented reality apps. There's also allegedly turn-by-turn voice directions for Bing Maps and a native podcast player, and one more potentially exciting thing -- voice-to-text for sending SMS messages without lifting a finger. Hear all about the rumor at our source link, at just about the 40-minute mark.
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