We have known for quite sometime that Microsoft is great at coming up with innovative ideas and concepts. Simple look at their portfolio and you will find a plethora of services and products that set new trends in the market and followed by others in the present. The only issue with Microsoft is their lack of ability to implement their ideas and concepts efficiently for mass use. Microsoft still keeps trying and at this year’s developer conference, they showed a simple but revolutionary way to enhance web search services by introducing bots to Bing search.
The Bing search will incorporate bots from the Skype platform into itself. The bots can be used to interact with visitors without any human interaction on the business side, while visitors can get the information they need instantly. Users searching the web for businesses like restaurants, shopping and more can click the option of “Chat” to connect to an available bot. You can start a conversation for things like reservations, menus or anything that you are interested in.
Microsoft gave a demo for getting information about a restaurant in Seattle with a dedicated bot that could offer details like menus, parking, reservation, and accept payment. The owners are allowed to expand the capabilities of the bot with all the necessary information they want to disseminate.
The bot is available to try by searching Bing for “Monsoon Restaurant Seattle” and the clicking the Chat button. The conversation is performed on Skype and you can even transfer it from the browser to Skype if you find this more convenient. You have to ensure that the location option for Bing is set to the US.
Microsoft also pointed towards the vision of making Bing a bot directory, i.e. users will be able to search for relevant bots and gain the benefits. With this, Bing could challenge Google for the position for a feature-rich search engine.
