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!).

Bing Maps

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