In a blog post today, the Bing team announced that voice search and voice to text—two popular Bing powered phone features—are now up to twice as fast and 15 percent more accurate, a feat accomplished by exploiting some recent artificial intelligence breakthroughs by Microsoft Research scientists. Check out the video below to see Bings Stefan Weitz and MSRs Michael Tjalve demo some of these improvements on Windows Phone 8—or just try them yourself. Tap the Search button, then the little...

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Microsoft is tweaking a number of its built in apps for Windows 8.1, but the Music app appears to include the most changes. A freshly redesigned copy of the Windows Store in leaked builds of Windows 8.1 has revealed the new user interface for Xbox Music. Microsoft previously revealed to The Verge that the focus with the new Music app is on playing songs, noting you can now play music in two clicks rather than six. Screenshots of the new Xbox Music update show a two panel interface that appears...

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Where My Mickey? is a brand new physics puzzler from Disney that comes to Windows 8 with stimulating weather mechanics and humorous animations. You solve challenging puzzles to see how the episode ends. You tap, swipe, and swirl to help Mickey collect water and complete each story. You get 3 episodes featuring Mickey for free with 2 Goofy episodes available for purchase. The game has a Live Tile, supports the Share charm and you can play the game with Snap! This is really just the tip of the...

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Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer at the Windows Phone 8 launch on October 29, 2012 in San Francisco. To peck away at the vast lead that rivals Google and Apple have in the mobile phone market, Microsoft is tapping its vast research unit to help improve speech recognition for folks who speak their text messages or use their voice to search the Web. Microsoft researchers say they have come up with a novel approach to boost the accuracy of speech recognition and rev up the speed in which it...

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The $500 price tag for the Xbox One elicited audible gasps during Microsoft E3 press conference. Speaking to Bloomberg, Xbox head Don Mattrick defended the hefty price, saying that Microsoft is over delivering on value with the Xbox One. It a lower number than some of the analysts had forecasted, Mattrick said. Were over delivering value against other choices, I think, consumers can get. Any modern product these days, you look at it [and] $499 isnt a ridiculous price point. Were delivering...

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If you thought Microsoft effort to push Surface RT tablets into classrooms would stop with a 10,000 unit giveaway, youd be mistaken. Ryan Lowdermilk, a technology evangelist for the company, revealed that it offering 32GB Surface RT slates to K 12 and higher education institutions in 25 countries for $199, more than 50 percent off the $499 retail sticker price. Dropping $249 for each unit will snag organizations keyboard infused Touch Covers, while bumping the cost to $289 will add Type Covers...

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According to numerous sources close to the company, Yahoo is offering to pay $30 million to $40 million for the maker of address book apps and plugins. Thats below the more than $40 million raised by the San Francisco based startup from a variety of venture capitalists, including First Round Capital and Khosla Ventures. Launched in 2008, Xobni — which is inbox spelled backwards — received its initial round of funding in 2006 from Y Combinator. Sources inside Yahoo said that, as...

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Ive had more than a few readers ask whether Microsoft also plans to offer attendees of its Build conference in late June a similar Surface RT Pro discount deal. The Softies arent sharing about what kind of swag paying Build attendees will get. One of my contacts said he heard attendees will get a free Surface Pro plus a free Acer Iconia W3 8 inch tablet. I wonder whether a Nokia Lumia of some kind might not be part of the grab bag, too along with various software development kits and other...

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