Microsoft's 'Bingification' of applications official begins with its integration of Bing into Word Online.
Microsoft is beginning to integrate its Bing search technology into Office, starting with Word Online, company officials announced on December 10.
Microsoft is calling the new embedded search capability "Insights for Office."
Microsoft is rolling out the capability worldwide (everywhere where
Bing is available) starting Wednesday. The rollout should be complete
within the next few days, officials said.
Users don't need to do
anything to get the new capability; it will just be added to Word
Online automatically. The new "intelligent search experience," as
Microsoft officials are calling this, isn't ad supported. It's free.
In Word Online, the Webified version of Word that is usable via a
variety of browsers, there will be an inline box that allows users to
specify for what they want to search (obtain an "insight" in Microsoft
parlance). Alternatively, users can opt to right click on a highlighted
word or phrase to trigger a search result right inside the document.
Those insights might be a Bing-curated entity cards or might be
Web-search results from Bing, depending on the word or phrase selected.
This
integration allows users to avoid having to leave a document, use a
search engine to find information they want to include/update, and then
return and add that information to the document. The search happens
inside the document and the results are presented in the document, as
well.
Here's an image showing what a search for Lincoln (inside of a Word Online document about Abraham Lincoln) might look like:
"We didn't just drop a search box into Word Online," explained Ryan
Gavin, Microsoft General Manager of search, cloud and content. "This
isn't a single word look-up for search. We are scanning and reading
documents for context and content so we can get THE answer instead of a
whole set of answers."
Gavin declined to say which other Office
Online apps might get the Insights for Office treatment next. He also
declined to say when and if Microsoft might integrate this capability
into locally installed Office applications.
Insights for Office
is another example of how Microsoft is turning Bing into more than just
a standalone Web search engine, Gavin said. Bing is evolving into an
"intelligent service layer or fabric" that is part of other products and
services -- for example, Cortana, Microsoft's personal digital
assistant, Xbox voice search and Windows 8's smart search -- he said.
One Microsoft evangelist demonstrated a very similar embedded search capability in Outlook
late last year. Microsoft Distinguished Technical Engineer James
Whittaker showed how an embedded Bing capability in email could surface
information based on the context and content of users' emails (with
their consent) and present them with related relevant information right
inside their mail messages.
Gavin said that Insights for Office was "influenced by" some of the technologies on which Whittaker and his colleagues worked.
On the back end, here's how that search integration works, according to a Wednesday blog post describing Insights for Office:
"Bing
indexes and stores entity data from around the web representing real
world people, places and things. Insights for Office utilizes Bing's
ability to index the world's knowledge and our machine learned relevance
models to semantically understand the most important content in a
user's document and then return the most relevant results. This
capability is derived largely from patterns of text analysis developed
in collaboration with Microsoft Research. The results deliver the most
relevant web links, images, etc. for a given request in the form of
entity cards - a quick overview of the most important attributes
(description, date of birth, etc.) about a real world person, place or
thing. In many cases, the entity card may provide enough information for
the user's query intent to be fulfilled without requiring any
additional exploration. If the user wants to dive deeper, they can click
on 'More quick insights' and 'More web results' to get even more
detailed search results."
Office Insights is yet another instance of Microsoft seeking to make its productivity apps and services more intelligent.
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