In July of this year, Microsoft made it official that Bing is more than just a search engine. It also is a dev platform, providing coders with controls, development kits and the back-end services powering these elements.
On October 21, Microsoft added a long-awaited piece to the Bing developer toolbox: A speech recognition control. This new control allows developers to build Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows RT Metro-Style/Windows Store apps that include speech-recognition as one of their inputs.
Microsoft execs also announced updates to the existing Bing Optical Character Recognition Control and Bing Translator Controls so that they support Windows 8.1.
“If you are a Windows Phone developer, you may already be familiar with the speech recognition inside Windows Phone: the user taps a microphone icon, speaks into the mic, and the text shows up on screen,” wrote members of the Bing Dev Center team in a new blog post. “Now, that same functionality is available on Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows RT through the free Bing Speech Recognition Control.”
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