On June 26th we announced Bing as a platform, uniting the intelligent services that power Bing.com and making these capabilities available to 3rd party developers via new APIs and controls. Several talks and educational sessions were given during BUILD that highlighted Bing’s new developer services, including the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) control for Windows 8 and 8.1, the Translator control for Windows 8 and 8.1, the Bing Maps for Windows Store Apps SDK for Windows 8.1, and the Text-To-Speech APIs for Windows 8.1 Store Apps. In addition, three new capabilities were announced, to be released around the Windows 8.1 general availability: an Entity API, 3D Mapping capabilities, and a speech recognition control for Windows Store apps.
To learn more about our announcement at BUILD, watch CVP Gurdeep Singh Pall unveil “Bing as a Platform” in Steve Ballmer's opening talk and see the preview of the Entity API in CVP Steve Guggenheimer’s talk.
We also hosted three educational sessions on how to use the capabilities of Bing as a platform. We received great feedback on each of the sessions and you should check them out here:
Using Bing platform controls to build great Windows apps – PM lead David Robinson & PM Altaf Gilani
In this session, we follow up on the keynote with a closer look at the new controls. We show how to use them in live code examples, provide details on what is already available for each control, and discuss what is coming in the pipeline.
Voice Interaction Design –UX designer Meg Niman & PM Jay Waltmunson
If you thought voice interaction was about one or two voice commands added to your mobile app, you should see this talk. If you have not thought about voice at all, you should see this talk too. This session will show you how to design great voice interaction for your apps, and how voice can be a differentiating aspect of your app in the market place and not just an afterthought.
Make Your Windows Store Apps Talk –PM lead Sriram Subramanian
This talk focuses on the brand new text to speech capabilities that will be available out of the box with the Windows 8.1 release. See how your apps can easily take advantage of the Bing technologies to provide unique experiences for your users.
Finally, you can see a question and answer session with members of the Bing team on Channel 9.
We have heard some questions around what exactly is supported, and you can find all the details at the Bing Dev Center. Stayed tuned at this blog and the Bing Dev Center for announcements and new samples that use our developer services.
-The Bing Developer Team