Searching for some awesome mobile APIs to use with your app? From facial recognition tech to amazingly user-friendly payment systems, there are numerous APIs that you can use to improve and enhance your latest application.
Below, we’ve listed five of our favorite undeniably awesome mobile APIs, from innovative mobile payment processors that take cash and cryptocurrencies to voice-responsive virtual assistants, face recognition systems and more.
Stripe (and Stripe Relay)
Stripe is an amazingly powerful online payment system that lets your business handle individual purchases, set up recurring credit card payments and more. One of the most widely used credit card processing platforms for mobile, Stripe’s API makes it easy to integrate with your app.
Organized around REST, the Stripe API makes it easy to integrate Stripe’s payment processing features into your app to accept payments. There are even native mobile libraries to simplify the process of adding Stripe payment processing to your iOS or Android app.
Another cool new development from Stripe is Stripe Relay, which lets customers buy products and services from your company within other mobile apps. Using Relay, you can give your app users the opportunity to buy from third-party merchants without ever having to leave your app.
Wit is a language recognition API that makes it easy to incorporate speed recognition into your app. Using Wit, you can create a Siri-style virtual assistant that’s capable of responding to the speech and intent of your users.
Integrating with Wit is simple; just set up your app’s target sentences, enter a few lines of code and the platform takes care of most other aspects of voice recognition and control, leaving you to focus on developing your application.
Wit also learns over time as it’s used more frequently, resulting in more accurate recognition the more your users interact with your app. Used by more than 20,000 developers, the Wit.ai API is designed for quick five-minute integration on iOS, Android and for web-based applications.
BitPay is a mobile payment platform that gives your users the ability to buy upgrades, gift cards and other items from within your app using their bitcoin wallets. Launched in 2011, it has since developed into a hugely popular payment option with a loyal audience of bitcoin enthusiasts.
Used by companies like Gyft, BitPay has a REST API that allows for secure, safe and affordable in-app payments. BitPay also offers a variety of integrated solutions and open source plugins to make integrating with your web-based app an equally simple process.
Concerned about accepting a virtual currency? Since BitPay pays out directly to your account in US dollars, Euros and other widely used currencies, there’s no need for your business to handle bitcoin directly.
MyScript is digital handwriting technology that converts handwritten digital ink” into text, letting your users “write” into your app manually. The technology is capable of recognizing 95% of all written language, as well as mathematical equations, shapes and even music notation.
Companies like Khan Academy and Notes Plus use MyScript’s API to let users manually input written notes and math equations. It’s also a perfect tool for adding manual text input into your app for forms and user profiles.
Add in shape recognition and MyScript becomes a powerful system for children’s mobile games and drawing apps. Learn more about how MyScript works here or view the API documentation.
Mobile Vision is an amazing developer product from Google that automatically detects objects in photos and videos. Using Mobile Vision, your app can detect a person’s face, a product barcode and even facial landmarks such as freckles and moles to an incredible degree of accuracy.
This makes it easy to detect the number of people within an image or video, trigger an action to occur when the user is smiling into the camera and even detect the same face from a variety of different angles.
Mobile Vision also includes a barcode detector, which is designed to automatically parse useful data from bar and QR codes in real time. Both aspects of Mobile Vision are awesome additions to apps that need to automatically detect human activity or products.
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