Today has been a big day for Microsoft. The company made a slew of announcements at the Microsoft Build event, where Steve Ballmer highlighted Microsoft developer momentum and some new opportunities for those taking part.

Among the new announcements were some new Bing announcements for developers. During the keynote, Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division talked about how Bing has “created a platform that enables the advanced technologies behind Bing.com to be embedded as intelligent services into Microsoft devices (e.g. Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox), Microsoft services (e.g. Office, Skype, ), and 3rd party apps.”

“Bing as a Platform will allow devices and services to help people interact with the world’s knowledge and their surroundings in a more human way,” a spokesperson for Microsoft says.

The new platform will deliver three broad categories of capabilities for third-party apps. These include, as described by the company:

• services to bring entities and the world’s knowledge to applications
• services to enable applications to deliver a more natural and intuitive user experiences
• services which bring an awareness of the physical world into your applications

“Highlights of the developer services include: The Bing Entity API, Bing Optical Character Recognition Control, Bing Translator Control, Bing Speech Control and Bing Maps 2D/3D Control,” the spokesperson says.

Developers will want to check out the Bing Developer Center and this blog post for more info on the news.

Microsoft also introduced two new Bing Apps for Windows 8.1: a new Food & Drink app and a Health & Fitness app. In addition to those, Bing Maps has been updated with some new features, including improved local search, personalized recommendations and more integration with other Windows apps like Facebook and OpenTable. More on the new apps here.