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Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#81
post #38
post #23

I don't know for certain, but I suspect that Google utilized images from the web in training this system. Even if they didn't, suppose they had. I think this can raise an interesting question around copyright. In training an AI system with hundreds/thousands of bits of data, no single piece of training data makes much of a difference. If one of my images on the web that I had captioned with the keyword 'dog' was used…

By using this API, we're effectively training Google's system to be more and more accurate. Shouldn't Google pay us for using it? Just saying :-)

They're probably already used Google customers as training unknowingly and now it's time to productise it and charge for it.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#83

I've been using this since the private beta to enrich my eCommerce crawlers with product identifiers not found on the content of an eCommerce product page, but found in the product image itself. Imagine a part number or UPC displayed on a product box, but nowhere in the HTML content of the product page. Using the Google CV OCR feature I can extract meaningful product data from an image to compliment my existing crawl…

Out of curiosity, why are there so many people crawling sites for prices like what you're talking about?

All of the freelance sites are... well, crawling with jobs involving web scrapers. What's the business here that I'm missing?

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#84

This is great news. I have been working on a Swift framework for using this API in OSX and iOS ( https://github.com/mgcm/CloudVisionKit ) and I was wondering when it (the API) would become available for public use.

With the Beta release, it is available for public use.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#85
post #83

I've been using this since the private beta to enrich my eCommerce crawlers with product identifiers not found on the content of an eCommerce product page, but found in the product image itself. Imagine a part number or UPC displayed on a product box, but nowhere in the HTML content of the product page. Using the Google CV OCR feature I can extract meaningful product data from an image to compliment my existing crawl…

Out of curiosity, why are there so many people crawling sites for prices like what you're talking about? All of the freelance sites are... well, crawling with jobs involving web scrapers. What's the business here that I'm missing?

If you can manage to slide -- even just a tiny bit -- between consumers and Ecom sites you can make a lot of money from referrals!

This is what slickeals and camelcamelcamel do, though only one of those uses scrapers.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#86
post #83

I've been using this since the private beta to enrich my eCommerce crawlers with product identifiers not found on the content of an eCommerce product page, but found in the product image itself. Imagine a part number or UPC displayed on a product box, but nowhere in the HTML content of the product page. Using the Google CV OCR feature I can extract meaningful product data from an image to compliment my existing crawl…

Out of curiosity, why are there so many people crawling sites for prices like what you're talking about? All of the freelance sites are... well, crawling with jobs involving web scrapers. What's the business here that I'm missing?

Economically speaking, it's taking advantage of imperfect markets, where even in this age of internet search information still doesn't flow perfectly from seller to buyer. Throw in affiliate and referral incentives, and you've created an information market.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#87
post #40

I was looking into label detection APIs (and Google's offerings as well) for a silly game/website I was thinking of writing, but $5 per 1000 images is way too steep, especially if each user is submitting 1-5 images per interaction with the website. The $2 per 1000 images price they mention on the blog post is only if you're doing 5+ million images a month. I played with IBM Watson visual recognition API and it didn't…

Agreed, this is an exciting api but the pricing puts it out of reach for a lot of applications

I'd like to preface this with the fact that I have next to zero experience about the topic of pricing/charging for such service's, so what I say might sound naïve, but…

Is it really that expensive, though? I mean I can see it being expensive if you use it inside a product you offer for free, but if it's a commercial product, I imagine the pricing isn't that much especially if you consider that using your own infrastructure for this type of machine learning and image scanning would be much much more expensive.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#88
post #83

I've been using this since the private beta to enrich my eCommerce crawlers with product identifiers not found on the content of an eCommerce product page, but found in the product image itself. Imagine a part number or UPC displayed on a product box, but nowhere in the HTML content of the product page. Using the Google CV OCR feature I can extract meaningful product data from an image to compliment my existing crawl…

Out of curiosity, why are there so many people crawling sites for prices like what you're talking about? All of the freelance sites are... well, crawling with jobs involving web scrapers. What's the business here that I'm missing?

I'm not crawling for price. Knowing where our products are being sold online is important to understand the landscape for a large manufacture. Understanding opportunities to develop sales relationships we may or may not have directly, and knowing category expansion opportunity is also important.

Re: Google Cloud Vision API enters Beta

#89
post #70

I've been using this since the private beta to enrich my eCommerce crawlers with product identifiers not found on the content of an eCommerce product page, but found in the product image itself. Imagine a part number or UPC displayed on a product box, but nowhere in the HTML content of the product page. Using the Google CV OCR feature I can extract meaningful product data from an image to compliment my existing crawl…

What's the hit rate for extracting meaningful information? Any false positives?

Since I compare the extracted OCR data against known part, catalog, upcs, skus, the variability is boolean. For instance if I OCR a picture of a tape roll and it has a part number printed on the seam I compare that to a trusted data source of part numbers.
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