Apple releases new machine learning tool to take on Microsoft Cognitive Services

Microsoft Cognitive Services allows developers to add vision, speech, language and knowledge AI capabilities to their apps. Custom Vision Service is a part of Microsoft Cognitive Services that allows developers to easily train, deploy, and improve custom image classifiers. Developers can train their own image classifier in minutes with few images per category. Once the model is trained, they can use it in their apps through REST APIs. Recently, Microsoft allowed developers to export their custom trained models to CoreML format for iOS 11 to run offline on mobile devices.

Yesterday, Apple released a new tool called Turi Create that allows developers to create custom machine learning models similar to Microsoft’s Custom Vision Service. Apple’s Turi Create can be used to add recommendations, object detection, image classification, image similarity or activity classification to iOS and macOS apps.

Turi Create highlights:

• Easy-to-use: Focus on tasks instead of algorithms
• Visual: Built-in, streaming visualizations to explore your data
• Flexible: Supports text, images, audio, video and sensor data
• Fast and Scalable: Work with large datasets on a single machine
• Ready To Deploy: Export models to Core ML for use in iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS apps

In addition to macOS and Linux, developers can use Turi Create on Windows 10 via WSL. Read the User Guide for more details on how to use Turi Create. Another surprise from Apple is that Turi Create is now open source. You can check it out here on GitHub.