DeepSeek Opens the Tools Behind Its Chat App to Outside Developers
DeepSeek has opened the features that run inside its consumer chat app to outside developers. On Nov. 13, 2026, the company posted a release note saying that web search, file input, link reading, safety screening, speech recognition and speech synthesis can now be called through the DeepSeek API.
The company's release note says developers can switch the built-in features on with a few request parameters, or call them one at a time as standalone interfaces: Search, Fetch, OCR (which reads text off images), speech-to-text and text-to-speech. The stated purpose is to spare developers from rebuilding those pieces, either to make an ordinary chat app do more or to recreate the whole DeepSeek app inside their own product.
Per the announcement, the built-in tools work with deepseek-flash, the company's faster model, across its Messages, Responses and Chat Completions request formats, and DeepSeek's own servers handle the tool calls and assemble the context. Web search covers pages and images and returns citations; file input parses PDFs, Office files and images into the conversation; link reading fetches any address a user puts in a message. The first two are switched on by two request parameters, deepseek_web_search and deepseek_read_url. Every one of these descriptions is DeepSeek's own, and no independent test of the new interfaces has been published.
The safety checks screen both what goes in and what comes out, and return a refusal flag when they detect a risk. DeepSeek states that any public-facing app has to enable them, and that developers stay responsible for moderating content, for registering the model where that applies, and for labeling AI-generated content.
Using the tools costs extra on top of the usual token charges. DeepSeek's pricing page lists search and web fetch at $0.75 per 1,000 calls each, file parsing and image text recognition at $0.225 per 1,000 pages, and speech-to-text at $0.116 per hour of audio, with text-to-speech at half its list price for a limited period.
DeepSeek also published an open-source demo of a chat front end, which it says can import a user's DeepSeek conversation history.
