This has been the question for most of us, and we mostly think of Bing as a tool for competing with Google Search. But it looks as it is not:
“(T)here’s a lot in Bing that I think represents the future of information technology.
“The real holy grail of what we all need to do is transform these machines so they understand you and what you mean. You ought to be able to say to your computer, verbally, type it, I don’t care, ‘Get me ready for my trip to the Imagine Cup.’ That ought to mean something to these systems. It means nothing today.
“I’ll give you another one that’s even funnier. If you go to a search engine today and you say, ‘Print my boarding pass on Southwest,’ you’ll get nothing back but chaos. The truth of the matter is, computers, search engines, nothing really understands verbs today. We only understand nouns. And yet, most of us as human beings want to command these systems to do something for us. And the core technology we’re developing to understand and try to simulate the world of users and what they’re interested in, and how they want to get it done is all being done in Bing.”