Google released Cloud Natural Language API. This service allows developers to access Google’s sentiment analysis, syntax analysis, and entity recognition.
Earlier in the year, Google released three machine-learning APIs; Vision API, Cloud Speech API, and the Translate API. All these APIs are pre-trained. The Cloud Speech API is now available in public beta. Cloud Speech API allows developers to convert speech to text. The API supports more than 80 different languages. Cloud Speech API uses the same voice technology recognition software that powers Google Search and Google Now.
The new API, Cloud Natural Language API, supports English, Spanish, and Japanese. Of course, more languages will be added in the future. The API allows apps to understand the meaning of the text through structure analysis. Google pointed out that the new API was developed to help developers and business enterprises in all industries.
APIs with sentiment analysis and entry recognition are not new. The Thomson Reuters Open Calais offers entity recognition. The service has been in the market for the last ten years. Entity recognition is the ability to provide identity information of people, locations, organizations, and events appearing in text format.
Sentiment analysis is also not a new thing. Sentiment analysis allows understanding of the overall sentiment in a block of text.
Syntax analysis is a relatively new development. APIs that have syntax analysis support can quickly identify parts of speech and create dependency parse trees. However, availability of such APIs is a problem. With the new API by Google, we can only wait and see how developers will integrate sentiment analysis in apps. The most obvious application of the sentiment analysis feature is powering chat bots. Such bots will quickly understand the incoming text, and reply accordingly.
Google has already produced the pricing of the Cloud Natural Language API. The price is dependent on how many of the three available features you are using. The price increases with the number of units analyzed. To show how the Cloud Natural Language API works, Google has a demo on their site where the API analyzes top stories from the New York Times.
