Microsoft Visual Search Developer Portal
Bing Visual Search Developer Platform allows developers to extend the capabilities and customize visual search for personal, product/service and enterprise use through skills.
The Developer Platform was released in alpha at Build. Developers can go to BingVisualSearch.com and build and test skills in the portal. We also enabled Visual Skills to be tested and visible in the Bing iOS App.
Microsoft has opened up Bing Visual Search for the developers so they can take advantage of the specific search made by the user and show relevant results. Developers can also use this to promote their services and at the same time allowing users access the required information. For example, if you search a photo of a food dish, developers can use the information to show you skills like how to cook it at home or the nearby restaurant that serves the dish and so on.
Role: Design Lead
Timeline: 3/2018 - 5/2018 (2 months)
Team: UX pm, UX dev, Backend dev, Design engineer, VOX
Press: Bing blog, Azure blog, Promo video, External blogpost
Project Preview Only
Goal
Bing Visual Search powers all image-as-input experiences across Microsoft's and 3rd party products and services.
- Availability of visual search experiences
- Predictability and quality of experience is lower
- Computer vision technology cannot scale to long tail of scenarios that are needed by users
To overcome this limitations and issues, and accrue towards our goal, we are enabling an ecosystem of visual search clients, developers, and users with Visual Search Developer Platform. The ecosystem allows developers to extend the capabilities of visual search with knowledge and actions that address a wide variety of scenarios and needs by users.
Success in an "Add-on" ecosystem hinges on 3 key components:
Market opportunity: How big is the addressable market?
Ease of participation: How hard is it to build, submit and begin exposing their skills?
Ease of sales: How easy is it for developers to promote and sell their skills on the platform?
How to build a skill
01. Decide when your skill should be invoked. You can configure your skill to be triggered on every image or you can customize the trigger based on the visual intent. To customize the trigger you can build a simple logical expression to combine multiple intents.
02. Choose additional image metadata that your skill can leverage to be successful.
03. Create your own web service that will provide users with more knowledge and/or actions. Provide access to your secure endpoint so that we can communicate with your skill.
04. Test and share your skill with friends and family or other developers.
Development
Responsive points
Sidebar docking
