Bing has announced that you can now use Bing’s visual search features with your cameras and the photos on your device. If you are walking around, let’s say on vacation, and see a landmark, you can take a photo using one of the Bing apps or upload a picture from your camera roll, and Bing should return more information about what you are looking at.
Here is a screen shot of how the feature looks after you snap a picture:
This is now supported in the US on the Bing app for iOS and Android and for Microsoft Launcher (Android only). Here is where you can find the camera button in these apps:
Here is a video demo of Bing’s new mobile visual search feature:
John Roach from the Microsoft research and innovation team wrote, “The visual search feature uses Microsoft’s computer vision algorithms, which are trained with datasets containing vast amounts of labeled images, as well as images from around the web. From the training images, the algorithms learn to recognize dogs from cats, for example, and roses from daisies.”
Google also has features that let you search using your camera, and they have been making a lot of strides with Google Lens over the years.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.