SAN FRANCISCO, June 21 (Xinhua) -- Microsoft Thursday announced new artificial intelligence (AI) powered visual search features that are added to its Bing search engine on mobile apps.
The software giant said its new intelligent visual search technology allows users to discover information about objects captured in images without having to pick keywords to fit into a search box.
"Sometimes, it is almost impossible to describe what you want to search for using words," said Vince Leung, product lead for Bing Images at Microsoft.
Citing an occasion when users are hiking through a meadow and seeing a flower that they've never seen before but want to know what it is, Microsoft said Bing' s Visual Search can help the users identify and find more information from a snapshot of the flower.
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 can tell dogs from cats, or roses from daisies, Microsoft said, adding that the algorithms continues to improve its performance with the accumulation of more data.
"With the advent of cloud computing, we are able to accelerate our ability to make sense out of pixels," Leung said.
The AI-powered visual search feature is available on Bing mobile apps, including android and iOS.