Each year, developers gather at Microsoft’s //build to see a showcase of fresh technology and new ideas in computing from across the company.
Developers are able to hear about, and get hands-on with the latest tech and data sources to see how these advances improve the consumer experience.
Several new opportunities for developers are available today, harnessing the power of Bing’s intelligence platform to make their applications more intelligent, engaging and discoverable. This expands upon Microsoft’s existing portfolio of Azure Machine Learning services, and enables developers to easily add intelligent services — such as vision, speech, facial recognition, and language understanding — into their solutions.
With new APIs, as well as new capabilities introduced with the latest Windows 10 SDK, we’re excited to take the next steps to enable developers. Our goal is to facilitate the creation of unique and useful experiences for consumers. The code name for this set of APIs, SDKS and services is Project Oxford. Let’s take a quick look at two of the services offered:
Speech APIs: Speech APIs provide state-of-the-art algorithms to process spoken language. With these APIs developers can easily include the ability to add speech driven actions into their applications. In certain cases, the APIs also allow for real-time interaction with the user as well.
Vision APIs: The Vision APIs are a collection of image processing algorithms designed to return information based on visual content and generate ideal thumbnails.
For more information on these, please check out the Project Oxford website.
Future of Cortana
Our personal assistant Cortana just got more personal with the announcementVoice Command capabilities from the new Windows 10 SDK. The enhancements allow more flexible speech and enable integration directly into the Cortana canvas. In addition, we are bringing the app-linking available with Bing to the Cortana canvas this summer. These are the next steps in helping developers take action to drive greater discovery and engagement with new or upgraded apps. More information can be found on the Windows Blog.
Developer Assistance
As a developer how many times have you needed to go to browser and search for code samples, projects or to find a resolution to your compilation errors? How often have you felt that it is difficult to pass context or project type to your search query in order to get the desired results?
Developer Assistant is now here to help you! It’s a Visual Studio extension that combines the power of the web using Bing and your development environment to give you personalized & contextual help for finding code samples, projects and compilation error solutions. Code sources include top code repositories on the web like MSDN, StackOverflow, Dotnetperls and CSharp411. The recent integration of GitHub has also brought millions of code samples residing in GitHub for .NET APIs and popular open source software to your fingertips.
To learn more, you can read the blog or watch the demo video. Install Developer Assistant now and send us an email with feedback .
Bing Solutions
This site is an integration point-of-access for a variety of Bing-related services. From one location, businesses, developers and partners will be able to access all of Bing’s services and related services powered by, or integrating Bing:
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Bing Ads
- Bing Places
- Developer Center
- App Linking
- Cortana Contextual Awareness
- Translator and Knowledge Widgets
- Sharing Feed
- APIs
- Search
- Cortana Voice Controls
- Maps
- Bing Ads SDK
- Voice-To-Text and Text-To-Voice
Bing is increasingly the intelligence behind many leading technology solutions inside and outside of Microsoft. Whether it is Cortana, Windows, Office, Xbox or our many leading partners who depend on us – Bing’s services help create immersive and engaging experiences. Businesses are betting on Bing. The APIs we’ve shared this week are the next step in the evolution of Bing as an intelligent asset with broader access.
Most of the APIs discussed at //build are available now at the Bing Solutions site. Additional plans for Cortana’s extensibility will be available in the future, so stay tuned for more.
We’ll wrap up with a little bit of fun for everyone. The Bing Search API was used to create How-Old.net, launched at Build, which uses the Project Oxford Face API to estimate age and gender of a person based on his or her photo. If you want to get technical and understand a bit more about how this tech works, this link is for you.
– The Bing Team