Google Uses AI to Lure New Cloud Customers

Google is pitching its artificial-intelligence software to commercial customers in a bid to catch rivals in the increasingly lucrative business of renting its computer servers to other companies. Google is making a renewed push into the cloud business, where it spent much of its 10 billion in capital expenditures last year to build new data centers and tapped Diane Greene, a high-profile Silicon Valley executive, to run the business. A core part of Google's cloud strategy is artificial intelligence. Wednesday, Google said it would start letting cloud customers tap into two software programs it has used internally to draw meaning from text and convert speech to text. The programs use so-called machine learning, a rapidly accelerating technology that enables computers to make inferences based on data they previously had analyzed.