In the race to be more than just a cloud provider, Microsoft and Google are bolstering their product portfolios to make themselves the go-to cloud.
First of all we have Google, which is widely considered to have one of the strongest offerings related to data analytics, which has decided to release Google Cloud Search to bring machine intelligence across G Suite.
The idea is to make it easy for companies to sort through internal information, because as companies move their data and workloads to the cloud it is becoming increasingly complex.
The company said that Cloud Search will bring, “the best of Google Search and machine intelligence to G Suite,” saying that it will provide search and proactive recommendations.
As an example the company cites opening the Cloud Search app on your phone, this will show relevant information organised into cards that will help the user to stay on top of their work.
Google said: “Assist cards are a new way to help you find the right information at the right time. Using Google’s machine intelligence technology, these cards can help you prepare for an upcoming meeting or even suggest files that need your attention.”
Users will also be able to search for people listed in their company’s directory and then start a hangout, send an email or make a call. 
For those worried about the privacy elements of this, Google said that people will only be able to search for and find files that they have access to.
Microsoft meanwhile has decided to build a cloud service that is designed to help software to understand specialist vocabularies and to cope with dialects and accents.
There have been plenty of examples over the years of voice recognition technology not understanding strong accents or certain dialects, but Microsoft thinks it may have the answer.
The company’s Custom Speech Service, which is part of its Cognitive Services suite, can support things like custom acoustic models and the user can assign weightings to what is being said so that the system is essentially being guided.
Basically this is like a training course for software that the developer undertakes in order to provide much more accurate applications that support speech input.
This latest offering will use the same API as the Bing Speech Service and sits in the Cognitive Services section, which now has 24 different APIs. Microsoft is certainly making a push in this area but plenty of work still needs to be done for tech in this area before it is faultless.
