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.