News · 29 May 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
There’s still some confusion surrounding some of the newly announced Windows Phone 7 Mango features, especially the Bing related ones like Local Scout, Bing Vision and the Quick Cards. As stated on Microsoft’s official Windows Phone website the Bing Local Scout “around me” feature is supposedly only supported in the US and the UK similar to the current Local search results in Windows Phone 7 pre-Mango. Interestingly Microsoft demonstrated this functionality alongside Bing Vision in nearly all of the VIP Mango events worldwide so it was safe to assume that it would be available to all consumers this fall.
Technically this is true because it can be enabled on in any region simply by setting the browser and search language to English (United States) in the phone’s settings (you can leave all your other regional settings untouched). Check out the short video I did using the Mango beta emulator and its integrated GPS simulator to show you that it really works as long as Microsoft has POIs and Local data for you location in the Bing database.
The applies to Bing Vision (it will work but the results will be in English). Voice-to-text and Text-to-voice should work in most countries already supported in the OS (Spanish, English, French, Italian, German and probably newer ones).On the other hand, the voice activated search will most probably still only work in English since Tell Me doesn’t yet work with other languages yet. Bing audio will only work in US, UK , France, Italy, Germany and Spain. Microsoft was reluctant to talk and demo some of the other Bing Mango features (turn-by-turn navigation, Twitter integration ..) because they still weren’t fully up in running in the current build.
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