Few expected this was likely to ever happen, let alone within weeks after the conference. On November 9 Google announced its open source TensorFlow machine-learning framework, followed three weeks later by its Cloud Vision image recognition API – technologies at the heart of the much praised Google Photos service.
So what exactly are these technologies? How will they impact existing image recognition API developers? And how useful could they be for photo app developers who don’t have the resources to develop image recognition technology themselves?