Microsoft hopes that it will attract app developers by giving them access to its speech recognition technology for Windows. Microsoft has been at the cutting edge when it comes to next-generation computer interfaces and in particular voice recognition. The company has been demonstrating its voice recognition credentials whether it's demanding a phone make a Bing internet search or filling in the fields in an Excel spreadsheet via dictation.

But now the company has included a new speech recognition tool in the Bing developer toolkit so that new apps for Windows 8.1 and Windows RT will be able to offer the new feature. The Speech Recognition Control enables a Windows 8, Windows 8.1, or Windows RT machine to convert audio speech input to written text. It does this by receiving audio data from a microphone, sending the audio data to a web service for analysis, and then returning its best interpretations of user speech as text.

Such applcations would support speech-to-text dictation and hands-free internet searches.