Six New & Improved Bing AI Offerings on Microsoft Cognitive Services

Today, we are announcing six new and advanced Bing Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities for Microsoft Cognitive Services. These new additions will enable innovative ways for users to interact with businesses and help them get rich, contextually-aware information. "The exciting new set of products and features we are announcing today as part of Cognitive Services, will enable developers to leverage insights from a world of knowledge and make it easy for them to create compelling Bing AI driven applications for their customers," says Gurpreet Singh Pall , Vice President, Microsoft AI&R.

At Microsoft, AI is playing a critical role in transforming businesses around the world by enabling more informed and smarter user experiences. To empower developers, data scientists, startups and enterprises, Microsoft Cognitive Services on Azure provides a variety of pre-built and customizable AI services developed from years of field research in search, speech, language, knowledge and vision. These cutting-edge AI capabilities are helping businesses build new scalable applications across iOS, Android, web and Windows without significant investments in hardware and IT operations.

Bringing image understanding & search experiences to every business

Bing Visual Search General Availability

Bing Visual Search API delivers Bing’s intelligent visual search capabilities currently available in the Bing search app and on Bing.com in a single API call, enabling developers to build compelling image applications and services.

Bing Visual Search helps people to identify entities and text within images to derive insights and find sources for similar images, products, and objects for categories including fashion, landmarks, flowers, celebrities and more.

Bing Visual Search

Bing Visual Search can also understand text to scan business cards and extract structured information. Also, Bing Visual Search can associate images with billions of webpages and provide image-based search from your domain. In addition to this API, developers can now extend the capabilities of visual search by building their own skills and enriching Microsoft’s products and services. For example, Bing users can now take photos of wine, spirit and beer bottles and, with the help of the skill from Delectable, get expert ratings, reviews of the wine and tasting notes.


With the alpha release of the Visual Search Developer Platform, developers can build skills on the platform and test them on the Bing iOS app. Soon these skills will also be available across Bing properties and other Microsoft properties with Bing Visual Search included. Check out the video below to see the visual search experience and skills in action:


New Capabilities with Bing Custom Search

Bing Custom Search is an ad-free search solution that enables customers to build a search experience and query content on their domain or across a set of hand-picked domains. To help users surface the results they want, Bing Custom Search provides a simple web interface where users can control rankings and pin or block responses to suit their needs.

Starting today, we are extending Bing Custom Search to support search across images on your domain. We are also adding availability of custom autosuggest to provide search suggestions relevant to your domain for intelligent, type-ahead capability. With this release, you will now be able to share your custom search instances with select individuals in your organization and quickly test your deployments using the instance staging feature. Bing Custom Search will also provide insights into your consumption with a variety of metrics along with rich slicing and dicing capabilities.

Bing Custom Search - Gears of War

Bing Statistics General Availability

The Bing Statistics Add-in will allow you to derive insights from the whole spectrum of Bing API usage. With this add-in, you can tap into metrics such as call volume, top queries, API response code distribution, market distribution amongst many others. The rich slicing and dicing capability equips you to gather deeper understanding of your users and their usage to help inform your business strategy.

Bing SDKs General Availability

Starting today, Bing SDKs – which were previously in preview - are available in four different programming languages (C#, Java, Node.js, and Python) to build applications in the desired language within the preferred development environment. Developers can get started using quickstarts available in the developer guide section of the relevant Bing offering.

Bringing knowledge of popular entities & facts and advanced webpage preview capabilities in Microsoft Cognitive Services Labs (for EN-US)

Microsoft Cognitive Services Labs provides developers with an early look at emerging Cognitive Services technologies. Early adopters who do not need market-ready technology can discover, try and provide feedback on new Cognitive Services technologies before they are generally available. Below are a couple of new additions from the Bing API team.

Project Answer Search

Project Answer Search leverages Bing’s industry-leading capability to sift through billions of webpages to find the most pertinent information for a user query. Rather than serving just links to the relevant webpages. This API serves search results with the most relevant facts and figures in a structured format.

Project URL Preview

With Project URL Preview, you can inform your user’s social sharing by providing a rich preview of the given URL in terms of page title, brief description and image. For maintaining the user experience, this API flags and helps suppress inappropriate adult content. Out of the box, Bing URL Preview can plug into and be a powerful addition to social and chat offerings.

Today’s announcements reflect Microsoft’s commitment to make AI accessible to everybody – developers and non-developers, small businesses and enterprises. We hope these offerings will help create new user experiences and bring new information discovery mechanisms.

As always, we are excited to see what applications you build and how Bing APIs help you do more with your business. For any ideas or suggestions, please reach out to us at User Voice or share your feedback with Azure Support.

- Bing API Team