Recap: Bing at //build/ 2016

If you couldn’t attend in person, we want to remind you that you are now able to get free access to all the Bing Search APIs, including documentation and demo widgets that demonstrate the capabilities of the offering. These APIs give developers access to the same search technology that powers the Bing search engine and other premium partner experiences.

Where to start

If you want to learn about Cognitive Services, we recommend you watch the talk by Harry Shum (EVP, Microsoft Research) and Gurpreet Singh Pall (Partner PM, Bing) where they discuss how to give your apps a more human side.  Next, see how the various APIs—Bing search, vision, language understanding, and translation—can be combined together to create unique experiences by watching this technical session about Microsoft Cognitive Services.

What’s new

Each of the RESTful Bing Search APIs is packed with new features for you to explore. There are now trending topics for image, video and news APIs. Image insights help you get more information about a given image, such as recipes, shopping, or identifying who is in a photo. The Autosuggest API helps your users complete their search queries more quickly. The Video Search API provides motion thumbnails that provide users with video previews. Finally, the Web Search API exposes the types of content you find on Bing.com, including ranking information. You can get more details on all the new features by watching ‘What’s new with the Bing Search APIs’.

You can also explore and play with the new features and filters with the API demo widgets we created. Enter the query, pick the filters, and get the preview along with the JSON code.  Here are some examples:

Image Demo Widget

ImageWidget

News Demo Widget

NewsWidget

See the APIs in action

Some of the demos shown at //build/ are based on the Bing Search APIs and the new Microsoft Bot Framework, a toolset created to help connect intelligent bots with your users. One good example we encourage you to check out is CaptionBot.ai, which makes use of a number of Bing Search and other intelligence APIs.

How to get started

Sign in with a Microsoft Account to request your own application IDs and try them for free. You could be making your own API calls in a matter of minutes!

Have feedback?

We enjoyed getting feedback from all the Build attendees who visited our demo stations and would love to hear from others, too. If you could not attend, let us know what you’re building by providing feedback at the link below. We’d love to hear what you think of the APIs and learn how we can improve them further.

And last but not least, our colleagues at Bing Maps had some interesting announcements at Build so we invite you to read their blog post if you are interested in learning more about what’s new in the Bing Maps space.

 

Bing for Partners Team

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