Google Goes to Grass Roots With Its New AI Tool

The company introduced a new tool –  Cloud AutoML – on Wednesday meant to make it easier to deploy AI in business applications. Disney and Urban Outfitters have already put this into practice to make search and shopping on their websites more rewarding.

Cloud AutoML starts with image recognition, allowing customers to drag in images and subsequently task their operating systems to recognize the pics on Google's cloud. The idea behind it is to put together AI and the machine learning technology that Google has been working on for the past two decades and bring the top-notch development to the masses.

This is basically a service provided for a fee that makes it faster and easier to create custom machine-learning models for image recognition, be it for a nature preservation website or online shopping and services portal.

"We believe Cloud AutoML will make AI experts even more productive, advance new fields in AI and help less-skilled engineers build powerful AI systems they previously only dreamed of," Jia Li, head of research and development for Google's cloud AI unit, and Fei-Fei Li, the group's chief scientist, wrote in a blog post.

Google is the third cloud company to introduce such an AI-related tool. Last May, Microsoft introduced a service for customizing  hands-on image recognition models, closely followed by Amazon’s SageMaker, designed to build individual AI models.

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