Will Google NL kill the market? Linguistic APIs review

Google has recently launched a new beta product – Google Cloud Natural Language API. As a  rule, any new product by Google makes the company’s rivals get in a slight panic. What major  players are to expect in the Natural Language area? Does it mean the end of free competition in  the linguistic API market and dictatorship by “The good corporation”?   

However, if we are to compose a list of other players in this sphere, a fear for Google’s  dominance will disappear. Apart from major players, this top also features small companies  that are notable for their flexibility and attention to customers’ needs. Let’s take a look at major  API providers and mull over their peculiarities.     

1) Alchemy IBM. AlchemyAPI's text analysis service started its existence in 2009.  AlchemyLanguage provides for several API servers that analyze texts and define meta-data,  including entities, sentiments, keywords, concepts, and relations between sentence  components (nouns, verbs, subjects, objects, etc.), authors, and more. Beside English, Alchemy  IBM supports other 7 languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and  Russian). 

This Academy seems kind of an incubator for young and promising projects. Many companies  started functioning after getting free access to this API within the Watson development  platform. Nevertheless, a high price for its usage in commercial projects push many customers  to search for alternative APIs.

2) Microsoft Cognitive Services based on Project Oxford and Bing and launched in March, 2016,  offer a range of APIs for text analysis, including sentiment analysis (English, Spanish, French,  and Portuguese), key phrases extraction (English, German, Spanish, and Japanese), detection of  topics for a list of submitted text records (minimum 100) and language recognition. 

3) Google Natural Language API. A beta version of this API service became available in July,  2016. For now, users can only relish basic tools: sentiment analysis (English), entity recognition,  and syntax analysis (English, Spanish, and Japanese). The service is already available on the paid  basis.

4) Intellexer API is a recently launched cloud semantic server (January, 2016). EffectiveSoft  - software company (based in San Diego, USA, and Minsk, Belarus) has been dealing with elaborating semantic tools (Intellexer SDK) and custom solutions since 2003. For today, Intellexer offers a full range of tools to analyze English texts. The features Intellexer provides for can be checked via user-friendly demos. Except the API, another semantic product, Intellexer Summarizer, is available in the user’s account. Intellexer also is available in form of SDK and some desktop and mobile Apps.

 5) TextRazor (created in London, UK, in 2011) is a Text Analytics/Natural Language Processing  API that offers entity recognition/linking, relation/property extraction, automatic categorization  and topic tagging. This API supports entity recognition, disambiguation, linking and topic  detection for texts in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian,  Spanish, and Swedish. TextRazor’s peculiarity consists in linking entities to DBPedia and  Wikipedia.

6) Aylien (Dublin, Ireland) has been also functioning since 2011. Its API can boast sentiment  analysis (both aspect-based and document-level), entity and concept extraction, document  summarization, classification by taxonomy (using pre-defined taxonomies), semantic labeling,  language detection, text extraction, related phrases suggestion, etc.  Furthermore, Aylien API  supports English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

7) Another company’s API worth mentioning is Semantria Lexalytics (Boston, USA). The  organization launched a cloud text-analyzing API in 2012. Its key text analysis features involve  entity extraction, categorization, summarization, sentiment analysis, etc. The API supports 22  languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, and Turkish.

8) The top-5 is closed by Indico (Boston, USA). This startup was established in 2013, coming out  of TechStars Boston. They call themselves a group of innovators whose aim is to revolutionize  software through machine learning. Indico Text Analysis comprises sentiment analysis at the  document level (demo supports only English), topic detection, keyword extraction, named  entity recognition. 

9) Haven on Demand is a service developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in 2014. It supplies  a number of APIs, including APIs for text analysis, i.e. document classification, concept and  entity extraction, document categorization, language identification, sentiment analysis, etc.

10) Meaning Cloud is a service launched by a Spanish company Daedalus in February, 2015; it’s a continuation of the previous company’s product – Textalytics. It supports text analysing in 5 languages: English, Spanish,  French, Portuguese, and Italian.

Conclusion

As we can see, linguistic APIs by Google’s rivals have no serious reasons to worry, as the  corporation has just presented the product first version that doesn’t differ much against the  background of other technologies.

All in all, users are those who win in this case. At their disposal there are various competing  products, so they can relish affordable prices and high-quality tools.    

This table highlights semantic APIs possibilities by different companies and features their prices.