bing up your app with the new Bing Speech Recognition Control and Updated Bing OCR, Translator Controls

Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket Blog - New Bing Speech Recognition Control and Updated Bing OCR and Translator Controls on Windows Azure Marketplace

At the BUILD conference in June, we announced three broad categories of capabilities the new Bing platform would deliver to developers: Services to bring entities and the world’s knowledge to your applications, services to enable your applications to deliver more natural and intuitive user experiences, and services which bring an awareness of the physical world into your applications. Earlier this month we updated the Bing Maps SDKs for Windows Store Apps for Windows 8 and 8.1. Building on this momentum, today we are announcing the release of the new Bing Speech Recognition Control for Windows 8 and 8.1, and updates to the Bing Optical Character Recognition Control for Windows 8.1 and Bing Translator Control for Windows 8.1 to continue to deliver on our effort to support developers to enable more knowledgeable, natural, and aware applications.

Read on for more details on the updates we’re announcing today, and then check out the Bing developer center for other useful resources, including code samples, for building smarter, more useful applications.

Hands free experiences – Speech Recognition for Windows 8.0 and 8.1

Whether for accessibility, safety, or simple convenience, being able to use your voice to interact hands-free with your device is increasingly important. By enabling devices to recognize speech, users can interact more naturally with their devices to dictate emails, search for the latest news, navigate their apps, and more. 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. Now, that same functionality is available on Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows RT through the free Bing Speech Recognition Control.

In as little as ten lines of C# + XAML or JavaScript + HTML, you can put a SpeechRecognizerUX control in your application, along with a microphone button and a TextBlock, and the code to support them. When the user clicks or taps the mic, they will hear a blip, or "earcon", to signal that it's time to speak, and an audio meter will show their current volume level. While speaking, the words detected will be shown in the control. When they stop speaking, or hit the Stop button on the speech control, they will get a brief animation and then their words will appear in the TextBlock.

...

..."

bing Dev Center - Speech

Getting started

Voice Commands

Lets users open and navigate your app with their voices.

Speech Recognition

Transcribes user speech into text.

Speech Synthesis

Also known as Text to Speech, speaks to users in a natural sounding voice.

Download the Speech Recognition Control for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.
Download the Windows 8.1 SDK to get Speech Synthesis for Windows 8.1.
Download the Windows Phone 8 SDK to get all three capabilities for Windows Phone 8.

bing Dev Center - Optical Character Recognition Control

Getting started

Integrate Microsoft’s robust cloud-based optical character recognition capabilities into your Windows 8.1 store apps in XAML and C# with the Bing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) control. The control detects printed text from an image captured by an app through the device camera.

To get started:

• Subscribe to the control in the Windows Azure Marketplace
• Download the OCR Control

bing Dev Center - Translator Control

Getting started

Get easy access to robust, cloud-based, automatic translation between more than 40 languages with the Bing Translator Control and the Microsoft Translator API.

To get started:

• Subscribe to the Translator Service in the Windows Azure Marketplace
• Download the Translator Control
• Getting Started with Microsoft Translator

I saw this a Build and loved the idea of being able to leverage the power of bing and the machine intelligence and learning behind it. Cloud power baby! (Of course you need to be connected to make it work, but who isn't connected these days?)