Ever wanted a way to easily extract and analyze meaningful data from text? The new Cloud Natural Language API has a feature that lets you extract entities from text -- like people, places and events -- with a single API call. Let's take the following sentence from a recent news article: LONDON -- J. K. Rowling always said that the seventh Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," would be the last in the series, and so far she has kept to her word. I could write my own algorithm to find the people and locations mentioned in this sentence, but that would be difficult. And it would be even more difficult if I wanted to gather more data on each of the mentioned entities, or analyze entities across thousands of sentences, while accounting for mentions of the same entity that are phrased differently (e.g., "Rowling" and "J.K. Rowling"). With Cloud Natural Language API, I can analyze the above sentence with the API's analyzeEntities method.

If you've ever learned to program, you've probably written a Fizz Buzz test. With Fizz Buzz, you print the numbers from 1 to 100, except if it is divisible by 3, you print "fizz"; if it's divisible by 5, you print "buzz"; and if it's divisible by 15 you print "fizzbuzz." This trivial coding problem is typically achieved with a couple of if statements and checking whether each number can be divided by 3 or 5. In his recent blog post "Fizz Buzz in TensorFlow," Grus imagines he's asked to solve Fizz Buzz as part of a job interview. But instead of taking the obvious approach, he uses TensorFlow, the open-source machine learning library developed by Google.

Posted by Kaz Sato, Staff Developer Advocate, Google and Ray Sakai, Product Manager, Reactive Inc. At GCP NEXT 2016, the biggest Google Cloud Platform event held this year in San Francisco, Jeff Dean, Google Senior Fellow, presented the Cloud Vision API with Cloud Vision Explorer. This amazing demo is now available for anyone and we warmly invite you to give it a try. To recap, Cloud Vision API is an image analysis service that's part of Cloud Platform. It enables you to understand the content of images by encapsulating powerful machine learning models in an easy-to-use REST API.