Google is making its cloud-based machine learning tech, which provides the back end smarts behind many of its most popular apps, available to developers.
The tech, which powers speech recognition in the Google Search app as well as Smart Reply in Inbox is now accessible as a limited preview.
Via the new API developers will be able to incorporate the tech that also assists Translate and runs the image search aspect of Google Photos, within their own apps.
Speaking at its own NEXT Cloud Platform conference, Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt says Google believes machine learning is “what’s next.” (via TechCrunch).
On the Google Cloud website, the firm writes: “Major Google applications use Cloud Machine Learning, including Photos (image search), the Google app (voice search), Translate and Inbox (Smart Reply),” the company says. “
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Each of the major skills will be available to download view a separate API.
For example, the Google Cloud Vision API will enable developers to ‘classify images into thousands of categories’ detect individual objects, faces and printed text within images.
Meanwhile, the Google Cloud Speech API will enable devs to build in the ability to convert audio to text in 80 languages.
These are known as pre-trained APIs, while others will empower developers to create machine learning models from their own data.
“Cloud Machine Learning will take care of everything from data ingestion through to prediction,” Google adds.
“The result: now any application can take advantage of the same deep learning techniques that power many of Google’s services.”