Google to bring artificial intelligence into daily life
In every pie: Google’s technologies will add value to self-driving cars, Google Photos’ search capabilities and Snapchat filters that convert the images of users into animated pictures. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Artificial intelligence has been the secret sauce for some of the biggest technology companies. But technology giant Alphabet Inc.’s Google is betting big on ‘democratising’ artificial intelligence and machine learning and making them available to everyone — users, developers and enterprises.
From detecting and managing deadly diseases, reducing accident risks to discovering financial fraud, Google said that it aimed to improve the quality of life by lowering entry barriers to using these technologies. These technologies would also add a lot of value to self-driving cars, Google Photos’ search capabilities and even Snapchat filters that convert the images of users into animated pictures.
“Google’s cloud platform already delivers customer applications to over a billion users every day,” said Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud. “Now if you can only imagine, combining the massive reach of this platform with the power of AI and making it available to everyone.”
AI aims to build machines that can simulate human intelligence processes, while Stanford University describes machine learning as “the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed.”
At the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco this month, Ms. Li announced the availability of cloud ‘Video Intelligence API’ to the developers. The technology was demonstrated on stage while playing a video. The API was not only able to find a dog in the video but also identify it as a dachshund. In another demo, a simple search for “beach” threw up videos which had beach clips inside them. Google said the API is the first of its kind, enabling developers to easily search and discover video content by providing information about entities. These include nouns such as “flower” or “human” and verbs such as “swim” or “fly” inside video content. It can even provide the contextual understanding of when those entities appear. For example, searching for “Tiger” would find all precise shots containing tigers across a video collection in Google cloud storage.
“Now finally we are beginning to shine the light on the dark matter of the digital universe,” said Ms. Li, who is also the director of the Artificial Intelligence and Vision Labs at Stanford University.
