Microsoft enables developers to add speech recognition

By -

Microsoft enables developers to add speech recognition to Windows 8 apps

Summary: Microsoft is continuing to flesh out its Bing developer platform with a new speech-recognition control, allowing coders to add speech input to their Windows 8 apps.
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.

Microsoft execs also announced updates to the existing Bing Optical Character Recognition Control and Bing Translator Controls so that they support Windows 8.1.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.
"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."
Microsoft has been encouraging developers to license its mapping, speech, translation and various other search-related application programming interfaces (APIs) for years with mixed success. Going forward, Microsoft's pitch to developers is that they can embed not just a set of static APIs and controls, but the continuously updated logic and data powering them.
Some of Microsoft's own product teams are already using these Bing API-plus-service packages. The Bing search experience in Windows 8.1, for example, is making use of a number of the Bing APIs and controls, plus the services powering these elements. And some of the recently announced Microsoft AppEx applications — like the Health & Fitness one that's been announced for Windows 8.1 — do, as well. The Bing search engine itself is powered by these services, too, company officials said.
Don't forget, it's Bing that provides the responses when users search by voice via Kinect for movies, TV shows and music. It's Bing that's parsing the natural-language-query commands, such as "Xbox, Snap Internet Explorer." Specifically, it's the Tellme voice technology, combined with social-graph information, plus Bing's search functionality.
In other developer-focused news this week, Microsoft announced availablity of the Windows Azure software development kit (SDK) 2.2, which adds support of the final RTM release of Visual Studio 2013; integrated Azure sign-in support within Visual Studio; VS 2013 RTM VM images for MSDN subscribers; and a preview of Azure Management Libraries for .Net.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Hacker steals data of millions of Bulgarians, emails it to local media

By -
Image
  Source of the data breach appears to be the country's National Revenue Agency A mysterious hacker has stolen the personal details of millions of Bulgarians and has emailed download links to the stolen data to local news publications. The data's origin is believed to be the country's National Revenue Agency (NRA), a department of the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance. In a  message posted on its website  on Monday, the NRA said it was working with the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency for National Security (SANS) to investigate the hack. "We are currently verifying whether the data is real," said the NRA. Hours after this article's publication, the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior  confirmed the hack . HACKER STOLE 110 DATABASES, LEAKED 57 According to reports from local media [ 1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ], who received part of the data, the hacker said they stole the personal details of over five million Bulgarians, of the country's total ...
Read more

​Linux totally dominates supercomputers

By -
Image
It finally happened. Today, all 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux. Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list . Today it finally happened:  All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux . The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the  November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list . Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 computers to the US' 144. China also leads the US in aggregate performance. China's supercomputers represent 35.4 percent of the Top500's flops, while the US trails with 29.6 percent. With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. When the  first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993 , Linux was barely more than a toy. It hadn't even adopted Tux as its masc...
Read more

Microsoft tries to stem its self-made collaboration-tool confusion

By -
Image
Microsoft is using this week's Ignite conference to try to help clarify its collaboration-tool strategy. Here's how SharePoint, Teams and Yammer figure in the mix. Choice is good. But too much choice, especially when it comes to collaboration tools, has been a problem for Microsoft. This isn't news to customers, partners or Microsoft execs themselves. But at the company's Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft execs took a step to try to clarify the company's strategy and messaging in this area. Microsoft Office 365 Marketing chief Ron Markezich kicked off the conference this week with a slide entitled "Microsoft 365 Teamwork: Where to Start a Conversation." That slide attempts to do what  Microsoft initially attempted with a 60-plus-page whitepaper : Clarify which collaboration tools customers should use when. The slide, which features SharePoint -- and its files, sites and content storage at the center -- is broken down into t...
Read more