Google launches new cloud service that will help you parse natural language
Google launched a new open beta Cloud Natural Language API on Wednesday to expand its intelligent cloud developer tools and help developers create applications that understand human language. This new API will give developers entrance to Google-powered view analysis, syntax analysis, and entity recognition.
This new API joins Google’s other pre-trained machine-learning APIs like a Cloud Speech API, that is now also accessible in open beta, a Vision API and a Translate API.
Currently, the new Cloud Natural Language API supports texts in English, Japanese and Spanish. Google here is looking to offer a service “that can meet a scale and opening needs of developers and enterprises in an extended operation of industries.”
It’s an important move for Google, as public cloud providers are competing to host new applications put together with intelligent capabilities. Natural language processing allows developers to build apps that can tackle the challenging task of understanding how humans communicate, and it is important for things like building intelligent assistants and chat bots.
The new API as previously stated will support three different types of analysis. Sentiment analysis will help you understand the overall sentiment of a block of text, entity recognition will allow you to identify the most relevant entities for a block of text and label them with types such as person, organization, location, events, products and media and will perform the basic function of identifying parts of speech and creating dependency parse trees for each sentence to disclose the structure and meaning of text.
The natural language API entered public beta along with Google’s already-announced Speech API, which allows applications take in recorded voice clips and get text back. It is possible for developers to build an app by connecting the two APIs that can listen to a user’s voice and then understand what that person is saying. The service is available in 80 different languages and it is the core that powers products such as Google Search and Google Now. Apparently, more than 5,000 companies signed up for Speech API alpha.
By launching these two services in beta, Google carries on its competition against the Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, which are also introducing intelligent capabilities in their public cloud platforms.
