AI based APIs
One of the buzzwords of 2017 is AI. It materializes in various forms like ML (Machine Learning) and DL (Deep Learning). All have the common domain of Artificial Intelligence, which is pieces of software that can act in an intelligent way.
Building such a system can require a lot of coding and training of the system. Like us human ML and DL needs to be exposed to a lot of various data to be able to learn. Unlike us humans the systems can handle big amount of data very quickly, never gets tired and don’t forget. It is not biased like us humans, it has no feelings — which can make you biased.
Give me an endpoint
After a lot of coding and training you can build an API endpoint into your AI system. You could share the API endpoint either for free or perhaps using various payment plans. Details. Actually that task is not different from common ways to share any code through an API.
This is nothing new. Many companies have already done that.
The new thing is within you.
You need to advance, open your eyes and start to have online (AI based) APIs in your mental toolkit when you build software services. When you try to break down a task, finding ways to build solutions to solve a task, you should think about if any (AI based) APIs should be part of the solution. Don’t limit yourself to known in-house methods and known patterns, look outside and see if you perhaps could lean on an external (AI based) API. Chances are that tools already have been invented and shared online which can be part of your service.
An example: A list of keywords from the input text.
Imagine that you have a website where you have editors producing content, like a stream of news, shared within a local domain. You want to tag the content, allowing to better link content together, eventually improving the chances of the website users to explore content on your website.
It can be very hard to categorize or tag content. It at least requires a lot of training for a human to do that. AI comes to our rescue here…
A company located in Switzerland — Cortical.io — actually has an AI based API endpoint for just that. Their service is defined to “Returns a list of keywords from the input text”. I did a test in their online API documentation which looked like this:

This endpoint is AI based, so (not sure if cortical.io has done this) it could in theory be smarter, be better trained, as people use it. That is however just one of the many cool things about AI based software.
This endpoint is just one example which I discovered listening to a podcast about AI: https://twimlai.com/ — “This week in ML & AI”. I found it particularly interesting as is based on ideas to simulate closely the human brain neurons, where other AI systems use brute-force statistics approaches to teach the AI systems.
So open your eyes — you need not only be aware of open source software, but should open your eyes to AI — perhaps starting with searching for relevant APIs.
Ps: I used the example AI based API to add tags to this post :-)
Relevant links:
