Bing plugin for translation and TTS in many languages

[jitterjames]

Here's the very first beta of the new Bing plugin.  You can use it to translate between many different languages, and also to read TTS (text to speech) out loud in many languages without having to purchase an expensive TTS engine for each language!

Support for this plugin will last for as long as Bing offers their free API.  You need to create your own API key (free) which will allow you to do many translation per day.  If you need to do more then you need to purchase a key from Microsoft.

Get your key by going to https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/developers/appids.aspx and following the directions.  You will need a windows live ID to sign in.

[jitterjames]

As expected Bing will be cancelling their free API, just as Google did.

These companies are driving me crazy!  It is hopeless. 

[jitterjames]

Dear Bing API Developer:

For the past several years, the Bing Search API has made search data available for developers to innovate and build upon. Today we are announcing that the Bing Search API will transition to an offering made available on the Windows Azure Marketplace. The Windows Azure Marketplace is a one stop shop for cloud data, apps, and services, including the Microsoft Translator API. Through this platform, developers can access hundreds of data sets and APIs and distribute their applications through the marketplace.

A few important things to note regarding the upcoming transition:
With the transition, Bing Search API developers will have access to fresher results, improved relevancy, and more opportunities to monetize their usage of the Search API. To offer these services at scale, we plan to move to a monthly subscription model. Developers can expect subscription pricing to start at approximately $40 (USD) per month for up to 20,000 queries each month.
The transition will begin in several weeks and will take a few months to complete. Developers will be encouraged to try the Bing Search API for free on the Windows Azure Marketplace during the transition period, before we begin charging for the service.
At this time, you can continue using Bing Search API 2.0 free of charge. After the transition period, Bing Search API 2.0 will no longer be available for free public use.
Details regarding the transition timeline, pricing structure, and other changes will be announced in upcoming weeks. In the meantime, we encourage you to explore the Windows Azure Marketplace and read the documentation. As a Bing Search API developer, you can expect the transition to involve targeting a new API end point, moderate changes to the request and response schemas, and a new security requirement to authenticate your application key. Developers using approximately 3 to 4 million queries and above can expect to transition through a separate process (details will be provided shortly).

[Kalle]

We user make the company's big, and then kick us in ass 
What come up next? Paying for a search result?

Kalle

[jitterjames]

we already pay for this by giving up our privacy.

[vulcanjedi]

the more i read from you guys.....the more i like you, u guys crack me up

[jitterjames]

the more i read from you guys.....the more i like you, u guys crack me up

I'm glad our suffering amuses you. 

[vulcanjedi]

Well I'm on the Apple support forums by the crippling battery life after the recent OS X upgrade and no one there seems to be amused by me if that gives you any comfort

[jitterjames]

Google does it again!  They have now closed down their weather api so our weather plugin is broken now too!

[xtermin8r]

We user make the company's big, and then kick us in ass  yuck
What come up next? Paying for a search result?

Ha ha ha, brilliant stuff Kalle.    

[vulcanjedi]

i just realized I'm kinda pissed by this now, as I was thinking being able to use a FOREIGN speech commands is brilliant and would in theory perhaps reduce errant pick ups from watching regular english! Ugh, find another free API!

[Phobophile]

Hi, James!

If you're still interested in having a translation plugin, I can suggest you this service.
First of all, it gives you 10000 requests a day for a single API key. And second, Yandex company is not known for monetizing their products by totally blocking free access, unlike those "corporations of good and justice", which were mentioned before (after all, it was made in the country of communists ). So, it's pretty unlikely that this service will be broken soon.
No TTS in this API though, just text.

[jitterjames]

Wow.  What a great find.  Assuming this offers decent quality translation it will come in very handy.

It looks like we will be able to make full use of the api using the scrape action.  I will look into it as soon as I have time and will post back with some sample XML if I have success with it.

Thanks for the info! 

[jitterjames]

By the way I just tested it and the Bing plugin still works great, but I don't know if you can still get an api key for it or not.  I am reluctant to share my key with the general public since it would probably get maxed out pretty quickly and then be revoked.

[Phobophile]

Ok, I've tried it and it works ok. Also, nime5ter posted his XML here.

By the way, I've stumbled upon some encoding-related bug in the XJSON plugin. When calling method GUI.ShowNotification with some silly characters in its params (cyrillic letters in my case), XBMC gets ?-symbols instead and shows them accordingly.
Although this RPC call works ok in the browser and in the scrape plugin:

Code: [Select]

http://127.0.0.1:8080/jsonrpc?request={"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"GUI.ShowNotification","params":{"title":"Test","message":"Тест"}}So I'm using scrape and direct RPC call as a workaround to display translated text in XBMC.