Cognition as a Service (CAAS) is the new kid on the block. No longer do engineers need to spend time building intelligence on top of their applications. Now, intelligence is borrowed from various services.

Welcome to Google Cloud AI Services Quick Start Guide, where we are going to explore the powerful Google Cloud AI services via a project-based approach. We are going to build a forum application named SmartExchange, similar to Discourse or Stack Overflow, where users start a discussion thread and other users comment on it.

To manage the content that goes into the SmartExchange application, we are going to use Google Cloud AI services such as Cloud Vision API and Video Intelligence API.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following:

• What is Google Cloud Platform?
• Cognition in the cloud
• What is Google Cloud AI?
• Overview of Google Cloud AI services