DeepSeek Opens Its Full App API: Search, Files and Voice for Developers

What happened

Developers can switch the features on by enabling parameters in the existing Messages, Responses and Chat Completions APIs, with tool calls and context assembly handled server-side. Built-in features include web search (deepseek_web_search), deep-thinking search, file input, link reading (deepseek_read_url), model safety checks and automatic conversation titles.

Web search covers web and image results, with answers carrying citations; with thinking enabled, the model searches and reads links on its own across multiple reasoning steps. File input accepts PDFs, Office files and images, adding them to the conversation context after plain-text extraction or rich-layout parsing.

Search and fetch, OCR, speech-to-text and text-to-speech are also available as standalone APIs. DeepSeek also open-sourced a demo chat client that can import conversation history exported from the DeepSeek app. WebProNews, citing DeepSeek's pricing pages, reported web search is billed at $0.75 per 1,000 searches; public-facing services must enable the safety checks.

Key facts

1. Release: Nov 13, 2026, in the DeepSeek API docs changelog, 'Releasing the full suite of application APIs'
2. Model: deepseek-flash (DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017); the built-in features do not yet support deepseek-v4-pro
3. Endpoints: Built-in features work across the Messages, Responses and Chat Completions APIs
4. Standalone APIs: Search and fetch, OCR, speech-to-text (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) can be called separately
5. Pricing: WebProNews reported web search at $0.75 per 1,000 searches, on top of token costs
6. Demo: An open-source chat demo client that can import DeepSeek chat history