It seems that Microsoft (News - Alert) has started focusing on an increasingly important area in its mobile phones: voice search. Microsoft has enhanced Bing Voice Search by leveraging the live voice translation technology demoed by the company last year. This will cut down on the processing response time of voice input by half on Windows Phone (News - Alert) devices, while also improving accuracy.

In fact, the improved accuracy applies to all voice-enabled aspects of the Windows Phone OS, such as voice-enabled SMS messaging. Overall, transcription accuracy has been improved by 15 percent.

These voice enhancements were likely implemented as a way to keep Windows Phone relevant in the face of the iPhone's popular Siri voice assistant and Google's (News - Alert) recent mobile search voice capabilities with the release of Google Now.

According to Microsoft, the use of Deep Neural Networks, a technique that simulates the use of a human brain, was integral to the Bing update. This is the same technology that powered the demo last year in which Microsoft's chief research officer Rick Rashid was able to produce a tonally accurate, real-time translation of his speech into Mandarin. However, the version of Deep Neural Networks used for the live translation demo was somewhat more advanced.

Bing's translation capabilities have already been upgraded a number of times over the past couple of years. Most recently, Microsoft added the ability to translate Klingon as part of a marketing partnership with Paramount Pictures.

In all, the new Bing Voice Search for Windows Phone relies on machine translation, text-to-speech conversion and automatic speech recognition to work, while the Deep Neural Networks technology mimics how the brain interprets speech.

"The burden of transcribing such voluminous files can be reduced significantly when data from one language can help improve accuracy for another," wrote Rob Knies, a senior writer for Microsoft Research, in a post.