On the evening of the 13th, DeepSeek released a set of “comprehensive” APIs, allowing developers to access all the useful features available within the DeepSeek App in their original form.
The list includes: online searches, in-depth thinking-based searches (where you decide yourself whether to access the internet or which link to follow during the reasoning process), file input, link reading, voice recognition functions, as well as a security verification mechanism for basic models. In terms of file formats, support is available for PDF files, Office documents, and images.
It’s extremely convenient to use. You simply need to access the corresponding parameters through the existing interface. All the tasks related to tool invocation and context processing are handled on the server side, so you don’t have to create your own separate processes for searching, fetching web pages, and inserting contextual information.
Currently, the version used to implement these functions is V4.1-Flash (referred to as "deepseek-flash" in the API). All three APIs – Messages, Responses, and Chat Completions – support this functionality. Additionally, services such as search, data scraping, OCR, speech recognition, and text-to-speech conversion can also be called independently.
The official team has also released an open-source frontend demo (deepseek-ai/chat-demo), which allows users to import historical conversations. In essence, this provides you with a locally deployed web version of DeepSeek.
This matter has the greatest impact on two types of people. The first group consists of those who develop shell applications; in the past, they differentiated their products by claiming to “help users access online search functions,” but this competitive advantage no longer exists today. The second group includes small and medium-sized teams. Previously, these teams had to combine three or four different services in order to create an assistant that could read PDF files and perform web searches; now, just one key component is sufficient to achieve the same goal.
Officials claim that using this set of APIs, it is even possible to create an exact replica of the DeepSeek App. This statement is not entirely marketing hype; they are indeed revealing the core capabilities of their own app.