Microsoft Launches Bing Apps For Office 2013

In an effort to create more synergy between its products, Microsoft’s search platform Bing has announced that Office 365 Premium is now available to users. The five apps included in the add-on for the newly launched Office 365 and Office 2013 make it easier for users to insert information and images directly from Bing searches into their documents. They are: Bing Finance for Excel, Bing Maps for Excel, Bing Image Search for Word, Bing News Search for Word, and Bing Dictionary for Excel and Word.

The company said that its goal is to make Bing available in convenient and intuitive ways that take advantage of knowledge Bing has assembled for search. Features include voice search on Bing for Mobile, implicit search such as Local Scout on Windows Phone, the ability to search using smartphone cameras with Bing Vision, and touch/contextual search with Bing on Window 8.