Google has now introduced new natural language processing services for its ML(Machine Learning) kit. ML Kit brings Google’s machine learning to mobile devices and is available for Android and iOS apps, the SDK now lets third-party developers add Smart Reply and other Natural Language Processing features to apps.
Google’s Machine Learning (ML) Kit is an SDK that incorporates years of Google’s work on machine learning into a Firebase package. Up until today, existing ML Kit APIs are all focused on image/video processing. This allows for face and landmark detection, OCR, barcode scanning, and image labeling but Google is now expanding into Natural Language Processing to analyze and generate text.
Now, Google has announced that the API is expanding into Natural Language Processing (NLP) to include Language Identification and Smart Reply. A new Smart Reply API brings Google’s contextual and automated responses to other third-party messaging apps. Like in Gmail and Messages, this feature works completely on-device with message history not sent to the cloud to ensure user privacy.
Smart Reply API aims to provide contextual text response suggestions based on the previous messages in the conversation. This API provides suggestions based on the last 10 messages in a conversation, but it can also work even with one past message. The API is completely stateless and runs fully on-device, so no message history is retained anywhere or sent to a server. The Smart Reply API is being launched with English language support first.
The Text Recognition API can intelligently identify, analyze and process text.
You can use this API to create applications that extract text from an image, so your users don’t have to waste time on tedious manual data entry. For example, you might use the Text Recognition API to help your users extract and record the information from receipts, invoices, business cards, or even nutritional labels, simply by taking a photo of the item in question.
Also introduced today, Language Identification can identify a language being spoken in a string of texts and can discern 103 different languages.
A beta version of face contours to recognize over 100 detailed points of a person’s face was added for the Face Detection API last fall.
Additional ML Kit features will likely be shared next month at the I/O developer conference, Google said in a blog post today.