Google APIs can add innovative features to your sites.
In this article, I've listed the most powerful, innovative, and interesting plugins from Big Google.
APIs are an invaluable tool for developers, as they let your sites and web apps stand on the shoulders of giants. They enable you to focus on unique application logic, instead of having to hack together plumbing from scratch.
Here’s is a guide to some of Google APIs, and how to use them in your projects.
1. Cloud Machine Learning Engine API
Speaking non-technically, machine learning is a process of taking input fields and then mapping them to a number of outputs. A classic application is turbine data, which is used to determine failure probabilities.
While machine-learning algorithms can be posted on any computer able to run Python, the number of resources you need rises significantly the larger the involved data sets get. As can be inferred from the other Google APIs highlighted in this feature, Google has experience handling all kinds of machine-learning-related jobs.
As a result, floating the job to Big G’s servers is a convenient way to solve the problem. In addition to removing the CPU burden from your machines, offloading the machine-learning payloads also improves the learning speed – due to the large number of iterations it can run, the company has been able to greatly accelerate the normally tedious machine-learning process.
However, developers looking to get started with machine learning must be made painfully aware that the Cloud Machine Learning Engine API is not a silver bullet. If you do not understand the basics of machine learning, your models will not work well.
2. Google Maps
There is a whole range of incredibly popular Google APIs that can be used to add Google Maps functionality to your sites, including mapping capabilities, street view, navigation, and more.
The APIs range from simple (basic page embeds you can use to display a map on a web page) to complex (JSON web services that enable you to.
For example, receive a set of directions for navigation between locations). The selection is split by platform and function.
3. Google Cloud Vision API
Whether you’re looking at bringing in image screening or want to offer users functionality based on their images, being able to understand user-generated and user-uploaded images can be invaluable. Sadly, creating neural networks by hand is an incredibly tedious job that takes lots of time and an insane amount of training images.
Google’s Cloud Vision API lets your programs tap into Big G’s machine learning systems. Upload an image or two and feast your eyes on the vast amounts of image data the company has at its disposal. Not only can the Cloud Vision API determine if an image contains explicit or infringing content, but it can also easily identify the content of images and even highlight specific features – useful if you need to pick out facial features in a busy image. A special mode returns cropping advice – this is helpful if uploaded images are to be cut down to a specific format required by your user interface.
4. Google Cloud Video Intelligence API
Google is always looking for new ways to generate extra revenue: an interesting avenue involves letting the Vision API loose on videos.
This is the raison d’etre for the Cloud Video Intelligence API – provide it with video data and prepare yourself for a torrent of metadata, cropping advice, and various other bits of auto-generated information.
5. Hangouts Chat API
Google has had a bumpy start in social networking. The Hangouts chat service seems to be the most valuable IP Google has salvaged from its defunct social play Google+ and seems quite likely to become its next big thing – especially as it can be extended to contain customer service bots. Take a look at the Hangouts Chat API.
The bot behaves just like the IRC servers of yore – it hangs around waiting for a user to invoke it by mentioning its name. The moment this happens, your code receives a callback with the incoming information and a bit of metadata about the user.
This data can then be used for a variety of ways – a good example was the #srcedit bot, which used to hang out in the channel on Freenode and provided ways to interact with information found in SVN.
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