Microsoft Bing Audio

» see bing.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

bing audio was a windows phone feature. windows phone never reached turkey at carrier-distribution scale and nobody in my circle owned a lumia. honestly, the closest i got to a windows phone was a five-minute play in a teknosa display window around 2013, where the live tiles were doing their flipping thing and the home screen looked nothing like an android. the bing audio button was somewhere inside the bing search app on that demo device and i never tapped it.

this is mostly told from the wikipedia entry and a microsoft blog post. bing audio launched with windows phone 7.5 mango on september 27 2011. it was microsoft's own answer to shazam and soundhound, built into the bing search app that came preinstalled on every windows phone. you tapped the bing search button, then the small music icon, and the phone listened for a few seconds and showed the song title, artist, and a link to xbox music to buy or stream it.

the underrated technical bit was that microsoft research developed its own audio fingerprinting algorithm rather than licensing shazam's. anyway, the implementation could listen continuously rather than for a fixed five-second window, which meant the matching could happen across slower decoders and longer ambient samples. in fairness, that was a meaningful edge in noisy rooms where shazam's fixed-window approach would time out. either way, the feature did not really matter for adoption because adoption was driven by which phone you bought and most people did not buy a windows phone.

i was not paying attention to the rollout. microsoft expanded bing audio to fourteen new countries in july 2013, bringing the supported set to a fairly long list of european, latin-american, and asia-pacific markets. windows phone 8.1 in 2014 absorbed bing audio into cortana, with the song-id history sitting inside cortana's notebook alongside the other context cards. that integration was useful if you had cortana, useless if you did not, and cortana itself only worked in english markets at first.

through 2016 and 2017 windows phone was visibly winding down. honestly, microsoft stopped releasing new lumia hardware after 2016, windows 10 mobile patched along through 2017 in a maintenance posture, and the bing audio button got pulled from the bing app on android and ios in late 2017. windows phone mainstream support ended on january 14 2020, by which point the bing audio service had been dead for two years already and nobody had noticed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it did ~

the user flow was three taps. you hit the bing search button (a hardware button on lumias), tapped the music note icon. the phone showed a listening animation while it analyzed a sample of the audio playing nearby. if a match was found you got the song page with artist, album art, sample preview, and an xbox music store link. no match meant a brief "no music found" message and a chance to try again.

the cortana version added context history. every song you identified got logged into cortana's notebook, where you could go back and see what you had heard tagged over the past weeks. that part was actually further along than what shazam was doing at the time. anyway, the feature only made sense if cortana was your primary assistant, which on a non-windows-phone device it almost never was.

~ what got buried with it ~

the audio fingerprinting algorithm microsoft research built for bing audio did not get released or open-sourced. honestly, it was an internal product of the bing search infrastructure and went into the same closet where the rest of the windows phone codebase ended up after the platform shutdown. shazam stayed as the only mass-market song-id service through the late 2010s, got bought by apple in 2018, and folded into siri and into apple music in the years after.

the broader story is that microsoft shipped credible technical work inside windows phone (the camera tuning on the lumia 1020, the audio research that ran bing audio, the live tiles ui model itself) and none of it survived the phone-line shutdown. the platform's collapse pulled down every adjacent service that was built only to run on it. either way, bing audio is a small example of the same pattern that also ended cortana, groove music, mixradio, and a long list of other lumia-tied microsoft consumer products.

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