Credit: Shutterstock photoThe latest move by Alphabet, Inc. (GOOG, GOOGL) places its Cloud Vision API into open beta for everyone. The announcement comes two months after Google’s Cloud Vision API was first made available, in limited preview. Cloud Vision API empowers apps, robots and drones with amazing image recognition and understanding capabilities and thus revolutionizes the way these applications and machines understand images.
The announcement opens the gates for all, as anyone can “access the API with location of images stored in Google Cloud Storage, along with existing support of embedding an image as part of the API request.” The move is of great importance especially for developers of applications, as it would allow comprehension of the content of images by submitting them to the Cloud Vision API. These image contents can be objects, or reading text within images or even product logo’s.
Google’s Cloud Vision API encapsulates the machine learning models which enable developers to understand the content of an image. The service is very user-friendly, and is accessible even via raspberry pi robots like “gopigo.” The robot can send direct images taken from its camera to the Cloud Vision API and get a real time analysis for those images.
Google’s Cloud Vision API is powered with the same technologies which are behind Google Photos, meaning Cloud Vision API can detect broad sets of objects such as animals, buildings, geographical landmarks, or flowers. It is further equipped with Google SafeSearch, which not only facilitates detection of inappropriate content but also moderates the content from crowd sourced images for the user. Other than recognizing product logos, Cloud Vision API also identifies emotions associated with people’s images like sorrow, joy, and anger. It can even extract text across a broad set of languages on the images via Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
Quota & Pricing
The users will have a quota of 20 million images/month during the beta time frame. Google specifies that Cloud Vision API “is not intended for real-time mission critical applications during beta.” Google also listed out its pricing which is “reasonable” and will be effective, starting March 1, 2016.
The charges will be incurred for each feature applied to an image; for example, if three features say, Landmark Detection, Label Detection and OCR are applied to same image, then each feature will be billed individually, calculated on the basis of 1,000 units/month. All features are free until 1,000 units/month and then the pricing starts. For example, a user will be billed for $2.50 per 1,000 images for 1001 to 1,000,000 units/month, $2 per 1,000 images for 1,000,001 to 5,000,000 units/month or $0.60 per 1,000 images for 5,000,001 to 20,000,000 units/months. Thus, pricing is inversely set to usage.
Usage & Responses
Google received an overwhelming response for Cloud Vision API since early December 2015 when its limited preview was made available. According to Google, “thousands of companies have used the API, generating millions of requests for image annotations” and the company is “amazed by the breadth of applications using Cloud Vision API.”
“PhotoFy, a social photo editing and branding app, moderates over 150,000 photos a day created by a wide audience. Before the Cloud Vision API was available, CTO Chris Keenan said that protecting these branded photos from abuse was almost impossible. With the Cloud Vision API, PhotoFy can flag potentially violent and adult content on user created photos in line with their abuse policies.”
According to Tomoaki Kobayakawa, GM, Aerosense, Inc. (a subsidiary of Sony Mobile Communications, Inc.), “We have drones that takes thousands of photos per flight. We find that Google Cloud Vision API as the best way to turn those huge number of photos, automatically produced, into meaningful insight.”
Final Word
Google’s announcement of the open beta version of Cloud Vision API is a welcome move especially for developers. Google believes that “the uses of Cloud Vision API are game changing to developers of all types of applications.” From a broader perspective, it is an important step forward towards creating a niche in the “emerging arena” of Artificial Intelligence where Google competes with companies like Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) and International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
