Marshmallow: The Next Android Flavor

It will then present you with information from the web to find out more, as well as a snapshot of key facts about that destination. As Bing pointed out to us, Google is not making its knowledge graph available to developers or any third parties. Or you could be looking at the homepage of a restaurant and quickly bring up reviews from Yelp. Free webinar on the omnichannel marketing strategy. This morning, Bing announced that what the company calls “Bing Snapshots” will deliver contextually relevant search information for any app installed on your Android device.

Microsoft just beat Google at its own game: the company has updated Bing Search on Android with a new feature that analyzes what’s on your screen to bring you useful, relevant information without the need to switch apps.

That is the opinion of Wall Street Journal’s Dan Gallagher, who reflected on the Google vs Apple, Android vs iOS battle, as Google prepares the launch of Android 6.0, named Marshmallow. Check out my separate post on that new API here. They can harness this powerful technology to bring this functionality to their applications. But Microsoft has beaten it to the punch and doesn’t require developers to integrate any code into their apps for it to work.

Above: An entity from Bing popping up in a chat app. From a developer point of view, it’s not clear at this point how the Bing API integration will be presented.

Starting this fall when the preview for Bing’s Knowledge and Action Graph application programming interface (API) begins, developers will be able to surface Bing snapshots inside their apps. This way, Microsoft Edge will automatically save the new search provider.

And if things work out the way Microsoft is hoping, this will result in people depending on Bing a lot more heavily. Where Bing has rights to share the data, we want to empower the developer community to create rich, innovative experiences that delight.