Microsoft Bing Now Finds Local Businesses That Aren’t Crowded

An app called Bing Now, demonstrated at Microsoft’s headquarters last week, could give Web searchers a way to gauge the current vibe of a bar or restaurant before they book a table.

Smartphones can already deliver directions to a restaurant, endless reviews, and other static information. But without making a phone call, or actually going, there’s no means of knowing if a place is busy and playing loud rock music or empty and playing quieter tunes. Microsoft researchers think that smartphone owners who are already there could collect this kind of up-to-the-minute information.

“Every time a user checks in to a business, he actually explicitly tells us where he is going, and we actually know the phone is in the user’s hands,” says Dimitrios Lymberopoulos, who is in the sensing and energy group of Microsoft Research. When a person checks in, as a Foursquare user would, the phone could collect 6- to 10-second audio samples, process them on the device, and send off the extracted data