Google Uses AI to Lure New Cloud Customers
July 20 2016 - 12:29PM
Dow Jones News
By Jack Nicas
Google is pitching its artificial-intelligence software to
commercial customers in a bid to catch rivals in the increasingly
lucrative business of renting its computer servers to other
companies.
The Alphabet Inc. unit has fallen behind competitors Amazon.com
Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in so-called cloud computing, a rapidly
growing business in which tech firms host other companies' digital
businesses on their servers. Forrester Research estimates roughly
$10.8 billion in cloud revenues for Amazon this year, $10.1 billion
for Microsoft and $3.9 billion for Google.
Google is making a renewed push into the cloud business, where
it spent much of its $10 billion in capital expenditures last year
to build new data centers and tapped Diane Greene, a high-profile
Silicon Valley executive, to run the business.
A core part of Google's cloud strategy is artificial
intelligence. Wednesday, Google said it would start letting cloud
customers tap into two software programs it has used internally to
draw meaning from text and convert speech to text. The programs use
so-called machine learning, a rapidly accelerating technology that
enables computers to make inferences based on data they previously
had analyzed.
Google said, for example, that clients could use the programs to
analyze customer reviews or social-media posts and to automatically
transcribe customer-service calls for large-scale analysis. Google
also offers programs that translate text and understand images,
including the ability to flag pornography and detect emotions from
facial expressions.
Many tech executives and computer scientists expect artificial
intelligence to help transform businesses over the next several
years, unlocking new insights from the reams of data companies
collect. Analysts expect artificial-intelligence programs to play a
growing role in cloud offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, Google and
others.
Google says its machine-learning programs that convert speech to
text, translate it and interpret it have helped one large customer
analyze more than two billion minutes of customer-service calls to
understand when customers end calls satisfied and when they
don't.
"That's been an intractable, unsolvable problem," said Rob
Craft, a Google product manager for machine learning.
Analysts said Amazon, Microsoft and International Business
Machines Corp. all offer machine-learning programs that are similar
to Google's with their cloud services.
Google's machine-learning offering "is great stuff, and it's
finally packaged in a way that developers really want," Forrester
Research principal analyst John Rymer said. "But they're not
alone....And (Amazon) and Microsoft are far ahead."
Microsoft has promoted machine-learning programs as a selling
point of its cloud business since last year, including programs
that recognize faces and make predictions, said Joseph Sirosh, vice
president of Microsoft's data group. Mr. Sirosh said Microsoft
helped the public-school system in Tacoma, Wash., use its data to
predict student dropouts and helped Dartmouth -- Hitchcock Medical
Center in Lebanon, N.H., predict illnesses for certain
patients.
The tech companies make money from the services by charging a
fraction of a cent for every request of the technology. For
Google's image-recognition function released several months ago,
"one or two customers using it trillions of times turns it into a
lovely revenue stream," Mr. Craft said.
Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 20, 2016 12:14 ET (16:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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