Microsoft’s Bing Torque Search app lets you search the web, get a weather forecast, calculate math problems, or perform other actions using your voice.

Torque launched in October as an app for Android Wear smartwatches. Now it’s available for Android phone as well.

All you need to do to start Torque is shake your phone (if you enable that feature).

torque_02

Torque is sort of Microsoft’s answer to Google’s “OK Google” feature for Android phones and tablets and Android Wear watches. Instead of saying a hotword to activate the search, you shake your phone. And instead of using Google as your search engine, Torque uses Bing.

That’s not the only difference. Torque presents results in a small window that appears on your screen which appears on top of any other apps that might be running, and it shows results silently: it won’t use your device’s speaker to tell you the time, weather, or other information you ask for.

It’s a neat little app… but it doesn’t really do much that you couldn’t already do with Google’s voice search features. Still, if you happen to have an Android phone but prefer Bing to Google for search, I suppose it’s nice to have another option.

via TechCrunch

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3 replies on “Microsoft Torque brings Bing voice search to Android phones”

  1. Who even uses Bing besides Microsoft Employees?
    If you want results from the most websites, that are most relevant => Google
    If you want Anonymity => duckduckgo

    1. There’s also Startpage.com, which is like an anonymous version of Google search (though searches take considerably longer to process)

  2. I wonder if counts toward Bing Rewards. Not that it matters too much as after getting a couple hundred points over a week or two Microsoft closed out my points or ability to continue using rewards. When I inquired as to why I was just told nothing could be done. Back to Google…

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