In a world where Google is king, Bing is beginning to spread. The service’s take over on iOS devices as Siri’s new backend search engine is a large step forward for the company, but Microsoft isn’t done there. Yesterday at Build 2013, the company announced that they would be opening a large number of new APIs and controls to developers.
Developers can now add Bing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to their Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 applications. A control can be implemented into applications which will allow the user to snap an image through the camera and have detailed information about the extracted text returned to the app itself.
Deploying an application throughout the world is no longer a problem with Bing Translator control. The new addition powered by Microsoft’s Translator API will automatically detect text and translate it into a specified language. No more worries about deploying that English news app to China.
Windows has always had the ability to take advantage of Text-to-Speech, but now the service is powered by Bing in Windows 8.1. Developers can take advantage of the new API in their C++, C#, and HTML-based JavaScript applications. In addition, a variety of voices are available now including English, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Russian, Polish, and Portuguese. All languages are powered by a synthesizer female voice, except for English which can be male or female.
Lastly, new integration of Bing Maps is available for developers. Programmers had to go through the pain staking process of parsing JSON-objects to communicate with Bing (very annoying for those who don’t code), now developers simply reference a collection of .NET classes (much easier!).
Microsoft also announced that the ability for developers to integrate 3D mapping capabilities powered by Bing is coming soon.
Are you excited of Bing beginning to take over or are you still a Googler?
Source: Bing Developer Blog
Review: Acer's TC-895 desktop PC offers some of the best value around
Need an affordable PC to use around the house for media or productivity? You could do a lot worse than the Acer Aspire TC-895. We dig in to see what it's all about.
Edge Canary for Android is here with unified code from Edge desktop
A new version of Microsoft Edge's browser is available on the Google Play Store. Dubbed Microsoft Edge Canary, this version is the first to unify Edge's underlying code with the desktop version of the browser. With it is a new UI change, new features, and improved performance. Here is where to get it.
Here's every major video game event in 2021 that we know of so far
The global pandemic means in-person events aren't happening and games are being delayed but that doesn't mean there aren't events happening. Here's a list of gaming events in 2021 — that we know of so far.
These external monitors go perfectly with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is an excellent laptop, but what if you want to project the display onto a larger screen? You'll need an external monitor for that. Here are our favorite options.