Google releases beta of Cloud Natural Language API

Google has announced the public beta launch of its Cloud Natural Language API, a new service that provides developers access to Google-powered sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and syntax analysis.

The new Cloud Natural Language API which would be joining Google’s other pre-trained machine-learning APIs like the Cloud Speech API, the Vision API, and the Translate API currently supports texts in English, Spanish and Japanese. Google notes that the idea here is to offer a service “that can meet the scale and performance needs of developers and enterprises in a broad range of industries.”

Google isn’t the first to offer an API for sentiment analysis and entity recognition. Thomson Reuters Open Calais has been offering support for entity recognition (that is, the ability to automatically identify and label the people, organizations, locations, and events mentioned in the text) for almost ten years now.

Syntax analysis APIs, however, aren’t as widely available yet and it would be interesting to see how developers will use them in their apps, but one can easily envision how this could be used to power chat bots, for example, and help them understand incoming requests.

There is a pricing chart available too.

Google has also launched a new Oregon region for its Google Cloud Platform cloud infrastructure which will be listed under the label us-west1 and will initially offer Google Compute Engine, Google Container Engine, and Google Cloud Storage services.