Microsoft has begun rolling out Bing on Xbox, its latest dashboard feature that allows users to search via voice for shows, movies, apps and Xbox games.

The development should be an appealing one for consumers, James McQuivey of Forrester Research says in "Engaged TV: Xbox 360 Leads The Way To A New Video Product Experience". It is "a single box that ties together all the content you want, made easily accessible through a universal, natural, voice-directed search. This is now the benchmark against which all other living room initiatives should be compared."

Entertainment Search Vertical

For the search community, Bing on Xbox is not a typical web search, Search Engine Watch notes.

"It's more of an entertainment search built specifically for the Xbox platform to help the system understand Xbox user intent."

Still, it is indicative of where Microsoft is taking Bing—part of the company's theme of moving people "outside the search box," SEW said.

A Good Place to Embed Search

Microsoft is on to something with its push to embed search, in this case voice search, in the gaming platform. Increasingly, these systems are becoming defacto entertainment centers with a high percentage of owners using video game consoles are being used for purposes other than gaming, according to new data from The Nielsen Company.

Of course, most owners of Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii consoles use them to play video games, with offline gaming much more common than online gaming. Other activities for which these consoles are used include  watching a video on-demand streaming subscription service and using the internet for browsing, social networking and watching online video.