Introduces custom Box Skills from IBM and support for new machine
learning services from Microsoft Azure
REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Box, Inc. (NYSE:BOX), 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:
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Image Intelligence: Detects individual objects and concepts and
recognizes text in image files.
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Audio Intelligence: Transcribes and identifies key topics in
spoken audio files.
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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:
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
For more information on Box Skills or the Box Skills Kit, please visit:
Experience the Future of Work
Join 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.
About Box
Box (NYSE:BOX) is the cloud content management company that empowers
enterprises to revolutionize how they work by securely connecting their
people, information and applications. Founded in 2005, Box powers more
than 85,000 businesses globally and 69 percent of the Fortune 500,
including AstraZeneca, General Electric, P&G, and The GAP. Box is
headquartered in Redwood City, CA, with offices across the United
States, Europe and Asia. To learn more about Box, visit http://www.box.com/.
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Box
Ashley McClusky
ashley@box.com
Source: Box, Inc.