Google’s ML Kit makes it easy to add AI smarts to iOS and Android apps

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/08/googles-ml-kit-makes-it-easy-to-add-ai-smart-to-ios-and-android-apps/

by coloneltcb • 8 years ago

197 23 8 years ago

djtriptych• 8 years ago

For whose definition of "easy"?

Can we axe the marketing-speak here? It's just released; developers get to decide how easy it is, not Google PR / Techcrunch right?

tyrankh• 8 years ago

Would it be a better page if it added footnotes to all adjectives "* For some definition of easy|some-adjective." :P

All joking aside, it's just a click bait title - that's how these things go. Try it out yourself and blog about your experiences with it!

erk__• 8 years ago

Google are good at choosing names... http://www.elsman.com/mlkit/

hooluupog• 8 years ago

Google: ARCore MLkit Apple: ARKit CoreML

Klathmon2• 8 years ago

Apple have been using (name)core and (name)kit for a lot longer.

As an aside, how do you escape a star character on HN without dropping to a code block?

rdtsc2• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)

jhall1468• 8 years ago

Jesus, so even super obscure languages that virtually no one uses is a problem?

laser• 8 years ago

This looks awesome. Though, I'm disappointed the face tracking has pretty limited landmarks and no positional tracking, I'm sure they'll improve the models in the future. https://firebase.google.com/docs/ml-kit/face-detection-conce...

sandGorgon• 8 years ago

This landmark tracking on the mobile is new for tensorflow . The benchmark here is dlib which does an implementation of One Millisecond Face Alignment with an Ensemble of Regression Trees paper by Kazemi and Sullivan.

Anyone know comparison benchmarks?

lalos• 8 years ago

Can't stop thinking about the centralization going on here, even if you avoid using Google apps now any app could be feeding back your information to Google.

bilbo0s• 8 years ago

Too bad "Ingredients" labels like they have on food are impractical in the App space. But maybe Apple could highlight key APIs and net connections that it finds in use during app review. Something like, "WARNING: This app makes silent, background connections to [Google, Facebook, etc etc]"

Like In App Purchase warnings, but for background net connections.

spsful• 8 years ago

I really like this idea, and while it seems like it would be a bit difficult for Apple to implement and the common consumer to understand, it would still further their goal of providing privacy to their users. Plus it would help consumers decide what services they want to give their information and analytics data to, which is pretty powerful.

nxc18• 8 years ago

This is a fabulous idea - and with the review process requires, I don't see this being unreasonable.

Developers will hate it, but I think Apple can take the hit. Google, too, but their review process is something of a joke.

debt• 8 years ago

Yeah like the Facebook login button.

halflings• 8 years ago

... the models are on-device. That's the whole point.

From the article:

"While Google Cloud already offers a number of similar pre-trained and customizable machine learning APIs, those don’t work offline"

"To power the on-device models, ML Kit uses the standard Neural Networks API on Android and its equivalent on Apple’s iOS."

hknd• 8 years ago

3p libraries won't be allowed to track your information without your consent, please see GDPR.

thirduncle• 8 years ago

Try again, please?

Almost by definition -- one does not simply "add smarts" (of any kind) to an app.

rahimnathwani• 8 years ago

Why do they provide another API for offline face detection, when Google Play Services already comes with one?

It would be great if apps that use the existing offline face detection were just switched to the better model, without needing to change any app code.

And, if the problem is that some devices can't run the new models, it would better for that to be handled by the API provider, than by each app developer.

Google’s ML Kit makes it easy to add AI smarts to iOS and Android apps

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