Tag: Bing search engine

Articles

GLAS thermostat powered by Windows 10 IoT Core operating system launched | WinCentral

Microsoft’s Glas thermostat knocks Nest with Cortana and air quality monitoring | Digital Trends

From the horse’s mouth

Johnson Controls

GLAS room thermostat

Product Page

Spec Sheet (PDF)

Video – Click or tap to play

Microsoft

Video – Click or tap to play

My Comments

Google’s Nest smart thermostat is facing competition with a unit that is driven by Microsoft technologies. Here, the Johnson Controls GLAS smart thermostat, which works with most central heating and air-conditioning setups that implement standard 24-volt wiring setups, connects to your home network via Wi-Fi and is built on a Windows 10 IoT Core operating system and the Universal Windows Platform.

Here, this means that it works tightly with Bing as its external data source for air-quality and current-local-weather metrics. As well, it works as a Cortana terminal so you can control the heating using your voice, but have access to other information resources you would be able to have access to if you used Cortana from your Windows 10 computer. At the moment, judging from the various YouTube videos I have seen of this device in action, this user experience will be audio-only but future firmware updates could provide visual support for Cortana’s replies.

The GLAS room thermostat implements the usual scheduling abilities that the typical programmable room thermostat offers but allows for preemptive operating for when you arrive or wake up so your home is nice and comfortable for you. There is the ability to know what the indoor and outdoor air quality is to be like as well as letting the current weather forecast be used to affect the system’s setpoint (comfort level). It could provide the answer about whether it is important to take that Ventolin inhaler with you if you are suffering from asthma that is aggravated by pollen or similar allergens.

The user interface is based on a colour OLED touchscreen which is actually a piece of translucent glass so you can effectively see the wall behind the thermostat. This means you are engaging with a user experience similar to that of a smartphone or tablet. As well, it would please those of us who place emphasis on devices that complement our room aesthetics. Let’s not forget that you could manage it from a Web page or your iOS / Android smartphone through a native app.

At the time of publication, the expected retail price for the GLAS Smart Room Thermostat will be US$319 with it expected to be released to the US market in March. Here, it will be available through the Microsoft Store or through Johnson Controls Website and dealers.

But what do I see of this thermostat? I see the possibility of it being one of many “smart devices” that will become a control surface for your smart home. In an increasing number of cases, it could also be a point of interaction for a voice-driven home-assistant platform like Alexa, Cortana or Google Assistant with the integrated display earning its keep for visual-support functionality. This is where you could use this thermostat’s touchscreen or Cortana interaction to manage something like lighting or music, or “call up” information at a glance with the information appearing on that display.

Articles

Now has the same intelligent-search abilities as Google

Microsoft is giving Bing more intelligence—and a dash of Reddit | Fast Company

Microsoft announces new AI-powered search features for Bing | The Verge

My Comments

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is inching closer to be on an equal footing to Google Search by implementing a host of new features that will be of benefit to users, metasearch providers and voice-driven assistants.

Recently, they provided support for fact-check tags so that users can know whether a news story is for real or not. This has been enhanced with the ability to show the fact-check results as supplied by the fact-checking organisation in the search-results list so you don’t need to visit the link to verify a claim.

Now they are interlinking with Reddit to bring forth results that have been drafted out through that forum. There is also object recognition for image-based searches along with machine reading to parse text and extract the meaning from it.

Bing will also support conversational search functionality, an effort based on Microsoft’s previous chatbot projects. It will also include aggregating resources about news events from multiple sources and with multiple perspectives, most likely from a list of news sources trusted by Microsoft.

This effort associated with Bing is also based on information search and analysis features that are being baked in to Microsoft’s Office 365 “software-as-a-service” functionality for their established Office desktop productivity suite. It is also in conjunction to the Insight functionality that Microsoft has just baked in to Excel.

What I see of this is a strong effort for Microsoft to become a viable competitor to Google in the “intelligent search” competition as far as full search engines (those who run their own search robots and build their own indexes) are concerned. I see this in response to Apple switching away from Bing to Google as the “driver” search engine for the Siri voice-driven assistant and Spotlight, the integrated search functionality baked in to MacOS.

But I also see this benefiting a range of Internet actors such as metasearch engines which aggregate results from established search-engine indexes, companies who want to integrate Web search in their product’s or service’s functionality as well as voice-driven assistants of the Alexa or Cortana kind. In this context, it is capitalising on a stronger partnership that Microsoft recently struck with Amazon so they can work together and share knowledge to improve the Cortana and Alexa voice-driven assistants.

It is a step in the right direction to provide a competitive intelligent-search function for the Web rather than having Google own the marketplace for this level of search functionality.