It's not every day we see Windows Phone being used to launch a major new feature, but Twitter has done just that. An update to its official app has just enabled automatic translation if you happen to be reading a person's tweet that isn't in English. The tweet isn't translated in your actual timeline; instead you have to manually click through, but that's nothing to complain about. Microsoft's Bing Platform, also released yesterday, is likely being used as the backend, so this feature could very well come to Twitter's official apps on Android and iOS (not to mention a whole range of other apps) in the near future.

Apple said on Tuesday that Bing would be the default search engine in the upcoming iOS 7.

It’s the latest prying apart of Google services from default placement on Apple devices, following YouTube and Google Maps.

Here’s what going on: If you ask Siri a question that it cannot answer with its pre-programmed system, the virtual personal assistant tries Web search.

Currently, Siri defaults to the user’s preferred Safari search engine, which is set by default to Google but can be changed to Yahoo or Bing.

But with the debut of iOS 7, Siri search will default to Bing instead. Not only will it use Microsoft’s search index to answer all queries that it can’t quickly answer on its own, it will skip the “would you like me to search the Web” interim step entirely.

Caveat: You can force Siri to search Google by asking it to do so — “search Google for smartphones.” But that requires an explicit command, one that adds an additional layer of complexity to a voice interface that’s supposed to be intuitive.

So, with Siri’s next iteration, Google search has very clearly been pushed to the side. And that’s worth noting. Because while Siri might not be widely used to search the Web today, it likely will be soon. The speech recognition and natural language technology that underlies Siri is the future of search. Indeed, Google itself is on record saying as much.

If voice is the future of search, and Bing becomes Siri’s go-to search engine come fall, what does that mean for Google and its place in iOS? What happens when Google is no longer the middleman for all those search results it currently monetizes on iOS? There’s far too little information available currently to really say. But those are questions worth asking. Because come fall, the last place where Google services will remain the default on iOS will be in the search bar for mobile Safari.

Signalling the tensions underlying this simple switcheroo, Google and Apple representatives declined to comment on the matter, even to clarify what exactly was happening. Microsoft Bing VP Derrick Connell said in a blog post, “Making sure customers can have access to the power of Bing where and when they need it has been a big focus of the work we have done over the past few years, and we are excited to work with Apple to deliver it to Siri users this fall.”

Less than a month ago, a Windows 8 advertisement made fun of Siri with the slogan “Less talking, more doing.”

Microsoft’s Bing China denied responsibility yesterday for a data leak in Sogou’s mobile input method that Sogou says is ultimately the fault of Bing and other search engines. “Bing search has not violated the robots.txt agreement,” the company said in a statement.

The madness started earlier this week, when security firm Wu Yun pointed out on Weibo that a new feature of Sogou’s input method software on mobile devices was, ahem, exposing Sogou users publicly. The feature allows users to upload photos and other multimedia to Sogou servers for sharing, but these uploads aren’t necessarily meant to be public. Unfortunately, Wu Yun discovered that they are all searchable via some search engines, including Bing, and users have since dug up some pretty embarrassing photos (including the ones pictured above, edited for nudity/privacy).

Sogou has responded that the problem is search engines violating the robots.txt agreement. Robots.txt is a file that allows websites to disable search engines and other bots from crawling and indexing their sites. For example, in pinyin.cn’s robots.txt file — that’s the server the images from Sogou mobile input are uploaded to — all bots except for a single Google bot are blocked from using the site.

It’s not clear how Bing or other search engines could be indexing the images if they’re not ignoring Sogou’s robots.txt file, but it’s worth noting that the robots.txt convention is just a general agreement, not an actual law. And it isn’t unprecedented for companies to ignore the blocks listed in a robots.txt file; for example, Qihoo 360‘s spiders were set to ignore Baidu’s robots.txt file in a dispute that led to a major lawsuit earlier this year (a Qihoo rep told us that the company respects robots.txt so long as it isn’t being “abused” by competitors).

But whether or not Bing is adhering to Sogou’s robots.txt file is probably of little concern to the people whose, um, data has already been found and shared by the public. Especially that guy on the left, who’s been getting a little stick from China’s netizens for having, ahem, a little stick. And while any search engine ignoring robots.txt is being obnoxious, it’s hard to argue that the ultimate blame doesn’t lie with Sogou here. Users put their trust and their nudie pics in the company’s hands, and it failed to protect them sufficiently.

Microsoft today launched its Bing Translator app for Windows (including Windows RT). We don’t usually write all that much about Windows apps and translation apps aren’t exactly new, either, but it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally brought virtually all of the features of its mobile translator app for Windows Phone, including camera-based translations for 7 input languages, to the desktop. Bing Translator, which is only available in Windows’ Modern UI/Metro mode, supports a total of 40 languages and also allows you to download language packs for offline usage.

For the most part, of course, this is par for the course for language translation apps these days. Google’s Translate for Android app also features all of these tools and supports 70 languages.

Here are the languages the Bing app currently supports:

• The 7 camera input languages include: Chinese (Simplified), English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.
• The app can translate to: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong Daw, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Klingon, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Microsoft’s implementation of the camera-based “augmented reality” translation mode is a bit smoother, however, as it will just overlay a translation over the camera image (and you can tap to save the caption). Google Translate, on the other hand, makes you tap on the words you want to translate. Admittedly, that’s not exactly hard, but Microsoft’s approach feels a bit easier and more like what iPhone users are accustomed to from tools like Word Lens.

Heavy Windows 8 users (there must be some…) will also appreciate that the app integrates with the Windows 8 “Share” charm to give you easy access to the translation tools.