Google launches new APIs that understand human language

Building on a raft of machine learning-related announcements it made earlier in the year, Google has just launched two new machine learning APIs into beta. The most exciting of the two looks to be the new Google Cloud Natural Language API, which is aimed at helping developers build applications that understand human language. The API works by letting users reveal the structure and meaning of a text, and is available in English, Spanish and Japanese for now, with the promise of support for additional languages to come. In a second blog post focusing on the Cloud Natural Language API, Google demonstrates how it can be used to analyze a report in the New York Times. Per Google's example, you can perform sentiment analysis on various blocks of text using the API, run the results in a BigQuery table, and then use Google Data Studio to visualize them: In a second example, Google showed how digital marketers can use the sentiment analysis capabilities in the Cloud Natural Language API to monitor customer calls to service centers and online reviews.