Box, Inc.,
a leader in cloud content management, today announced the expansion of
its private beta program for Box Skills - the breakthrough framework for
applying state-of-the-art machine learning technologies, such as
computer vision and video indexing, to content stored in Box. Previously
only available to select customers, Box Skills will be expanding its
private beta access to additional customers starting in July, with
several customers added each week. Customers interested in participating
in the beta program can join the waitlist at https://www.box.com/skills.
In addition, Box also announced the availability of a new service
offering from IBM to build custom Box Skills as well as Box Skills Kit
support for new cognitive services from Microsoft Azure.
"Content
is the next great untapped resource of insights and innovation in the
enterprise," said Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer, Box. "Box Skills
brings ground-breaking machine learning to enterprise content for the
first time and will enable organizations to reimagine and digitize
business processes on Box. We're about to enter the next major frontier
of computing with AI and it will completely change how we work together
and collaborate on content."
At BoxWorks 2017, Box previewed three initial skills that
leverage machine learning services - like IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure
and Google Cloud - to organize, protect and automate processes around
business content in Box. The three initial skills include:
- Image Intelligence: Detects individual objects and concepts and recognizes text in image files.
- Audio Intelligence: Transcribes and identifies key topics in spoken audio files.
- Video Intelligence: Transcribes and identifies key topics for speech and detects individual faces as they appear in video files.
Over
the past few months, Box has on-boarded an initial set of customers,
including Virgin Trains, Ancestry.com, The University of Chicago, City
of San Jose and others, into the private beta program for Box Skills.
The customers participating in the private beta are leveraging Box
Skills for a wide variety of enterprise use cases and digital business
processes. For example, a large insurance company is building a custom
skill to automatically label household objects in images and videos as
part of a digital homeowner's insurance policy process, and a
construction equipment rental company is building a custom skill to
automatically identify equipment type and extract part numbers from
vehicles in images and videos.
"At
Virgin Trains, we're constantly looking for new ways to become a more
digital business by accelerating processes and improving our employee
and customer experiences," said John Sullivan, CIO and Project Director
at Virgin Trains. "With Box Skills, we can easily bring the best of
artificial intelligence and machine learning to the way our organization
works every day, helping us streamline collaboration and digitize
business processes faster than we were able to before. We're incredibly
excited about the possibilities of Box Skills."
Enriching Box Content with Custom Solutions from IBM Watson
Last week, IBM and Box announced the
availability of a new service offering from IBM to build custom Box
Skills that apply Watson AI technologies to the Box Skills framework.
These new, customizable solutions, built using the Box Skills Kit, will
enable businesses to work hands-on with the IBM team to apply IBM's
enterprise-strength Watson AI technologies to enterprise content managed
in Box.
IBM introduced two new services for building custom Box Skills:
- Custom image insights with Watson Visual Recognition: This
custom solution analyzes image data, enriching it with classifiers to
make it easy to search and consume, and training custom visual models
that best address business needs. For example, an environmental
organization could leverage a custom skill that can analyze satellite
images of coastal erosion in Box, quickly detecting areas of most
impact, speeding up the time to taking action and reducing the costs of
monitoring.
- Custom document insights with Watson Natural Language Understanding: This
custom skill automatically tags documents stored in Box with relevant
concepts, entities, and keywords to enrich the content and make it more
searchable. This skill will also help users quickly access specific
information in dense documents like research papers, service manuals and
legal documents. For lawyers working on time-sensitive matters, this
could be the difference between making a court filing deadline and
needing to file for a costly extension.
Support for the Latest Azure Cognitive Services from Microsoft
Designed
as an open and flexible framework, the capabilities of Box Skills will
grow and evolve as new and expanded machine learning services are made
available from providers around the industry. To that end, Box also
announced today support for new AI services available from Microsoft
Azure that were announced as part of Microsoft Build 2018, Microsoft's
annual developer conference, including:
- Improved OCR in Computer Vision: Using
the improved OCR engine now available through Computer Vision, part of
Azure Cognitive Services, any image-based Box Skill will now be able to
better identify text within images, improving accuracy and speed of
image-based workflows, such as digital asset management.
- Expanded object detection in Computer Vision: Computer
Vision is now able to detect dozens more objects within images, making
it easier to apply rich metadata to images in Box. Now, when images are
uploaded to Box and any image-based skill is applied, including Box's
Image Intelligence Skill, Computer Vision will return even richer
results to apply to the file in Box.
- New speech services for audio analysis: Microsoft
Azure announced several speech-related technologies such as the ability
to define a set of vocabulary to recognize things like
industry-specific terms.
Experience the Future of WorkJoin
us at BoxWorks 2018, Box's annual user conference happening August
29-30th at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Whether you're building a
digital workplace, creating workflows for your digital business or
securing your organization's data, don't miss this opportunity to become
a leader in digital transformation. To meet the people and technology
behind the modern cloud stack and hear from groundbreaking companies
like Netflix, NASA, Morgan Stanley, Slack and Microsoft, register here: https://www.box.com/boxworks/.
Pricing and Availability
Box
Skills, including the three initial skills built by Box, is available
now in private beta with pricing and general availability to be
announced this fall. Additionally, the Box Skills Kit, a developer
toolkit for building custom skills, is available now in a private beta.
Customers interested in participating in these private betas can join
the waitlist here.