Google launches new cloud service that will help you analyze natural language
Google on Wednesday launched a new open beta Cloud Natural Language API to expand tools and help developers build applications that understand human language. This new API will give developers access to Google-powered view analysis, syntactic analysis, and entity recognition.
This new API follows on from other pre-trained machine learning APIs from Google, such as the Cloud Speech API, a Vision API, and a Translate API. Currently, the new Cloud Natural Language API supports text in English, Japanese, and Spanish.
It's a significant move for Google as public cloud providers compete to host new applications with intelligent capabilities. The Natural Language Processing allows developers to create applications that can tackle the difficult task of understanding how people communicate, and is important for things like building intelligent assistants and chat bots.
The new API, as mentioned earlier, will support three different types of analysis. Sentiment analysis will help you understand the overall sentiment of a text, entity recognition will allow you to identify the most relevant entities for a text and tag them with things like personnel, organization, location, events, products, and media, and it will perform the basic function of part-of-speech recognition and parse each sentence to reveal the structure and meaning of the text.
The new API entered public beta alongside Google’s Speech API, which allows apps to take recorded voice and convert it to text. It’s possible for developers to build an app by combining 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 is the core that powers products like Google Search and Google Now.
By pushing these two services into beta, Google is competing with Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM, which have also introduced similar capabilities to their public platforms.
