Google says its Cloud Vision API is now in public beta, meaning that any developer can add the tool’s image recognition capabilities to applications. The Cloud Vision API can extract text from images, classify thousands of different objects, flag inappropriate content and do sentiment analysis.
Pricing for the Cloud Vision API varies based on which features developers tap. For example, label detection costs $2 per 1,000 images and optical character recognition costs $0.60 per 1,000 images. During the beta, developers are limited to analyzing 20 million images per month.
Several other companies, including Microsoft and IBM, have also recently introduced cloud-based artificial intelligence tools with computer vision capabilities.
