DeepSeek opens its app features as standalone application APIs

DeepSeek announced on November 13, 2026 that it is releasing the web search, document parsing, speech and safety features from its chat app as standalone APIs, alongside an open-source demo chat client.

DeepSeek released a full suite of application-level APIs on November 13, 2026, according to the company's official API changelog. The post, titled "Releasing the full suite of application APIs," covers capabilities that were previously bundled inside DeepSeek's chat app, including web search, URL reading, document and file parsing, standalone speech recognition and text-to-speech, and content-safety review.

What changed

A new deepseek_web_search tool lets the model run web or image searches when thinking is disabled, while deep-thinking search combines reasoning with multi-step web searching.
File input support was added for PDFs, Office documents and images, with a choice of plain-text extraction or rich-layout parsing.
A new URL-reading feature detects links inside a user message and automatically fetches the page content.
A new content-safety feature returns a refusal marker whenever a risk is found in a request.
Search & Fetch, OCR, ASR and TTS are now also offered as standalone APIs, independent of chat completion.
The features are built around the deepseek-flash model, served by DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, and deepseek-v4-pro.

What it means for people building with AI

For developers building on DeepSeek's API, the release means drop-in access to search, document parsing, speech and safety tooling without assembling a separate pipeline for each capability. Because the API keeps its OpenAI and Anthropic format compatibility through api.deepseek.com and api.deepseek.com/anthropic, these features can be used from existing coding agents such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode without any code changes.

Availability

Alongside the API update, DeepSeek released an open-source demo chat client that supports multi-turn conversation, voice input and output, and the import of historical DeepSeek chat logs.

Sources

DeepSeek API Updates - Releasing the full suite of application APIs (DeepSeek, November 13, 2026, official)

Written with AI assistance, strictly from the sources listed above. Before it went live, automated checks verified its dates, sources and every language edition.