Windows Phone 7 updates Bing to find music and barcodes, provide turn-by-turn directions and Bing Audio will act like a Shazam for recognizing music 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………….
Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango update) has had some new features leaked compliments of Windows Phone devs Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk and there will be several new major features debuting in WP7.5 including Bing Audio and Vision, SMS Dictation, on-device podcast support and also turn-by-turn navigation.Bing Audio is essentially a rebranded service similar to Shazaam and users will be able to hold up their WP7 phone and also let it listen to a song in order to find and display song info.This is a Shazam-type service integrated directly into the Bing search window. Just like Shazam, you press the Bing Audio button on the bottom toolbar and record a snippet of the song you are listening to. If a match is found, it will come in the form of a Marketplace result, while still remaining inside the Bing window. Clicking that link will bring you into the Marketplace where you can stream the song, download it, or purchase it.US, Great Britian, France, Italy, Germany and Spain are the initial countries that Bing Audio supports.
Bing Vision will work in a similar fashion to Bing Audio, though take in info from various bar codes, text, and images and the emaining features are pretty self-explanatory, though still much needed.This is a search service using the camera. There are already separate apps like this available, but this is baked right into WP7, allowing you to scan barcodes, Microsoft Tags, QR Codes, books, DVD’s, CD’s and even text using OCR.Support for “Vision Recognizers” is available, suggesting that additional services can be added, letting you take a picture of a structure and get Bing results from it, or possibly layer search results on top of the camera view. It could support augmented reality apps as well.There seems to be the ability to adjust your podcast series settings within the phone. There is even a screenshot of a video podcast playing, while it’s still downloading!Also rumored is the integration of turn-by-turn directions, which has been a big hole missing from the current version of WP7. Allowing you to text while driving (sarcasm) and saving you from the dreaded “Blackberry Thumbs”, comes native voice texting. LG’s WP7 lineup had an app that attempted this, but this will be natively supported.
[ttjad keyword=”wp-7″]
