Dive Brief:

• Google is pushing the artificial intelligence capabilities of its cloud offering as part of a strategy to set itself apart from competitors and improve Google's cloud appeal to enterprise customers.
• Wednesday, Google debuted two new speech and natural language tools that businesses can use to bring natural language capabilities to computer systems.
• The company also announced it is adding more cloud computing capacity in its Oregon data center in an effort to reduce latency.

Dive Insight:

Though Google is pushing hard on cloud, competition is fierce, with AWS and Microsoft showing strong growth in the space this year. But the company has renewed its cloud business efforts this year, led by Diane Greene, Google’s head of cloud computing. Greene has argued that Google's cloud platform is ready to compete with cloud industry leaders.

Amazon, Microsoft and IBM all also offer machine-learning programs with their cloud services, but Google is publicizing how companies can rent its computer servers for AI initiatives to help it stand out among the competition.

The new tools Google introduced, for example, makes it so "digital marketers can analyze online product reviews or service centers can determine sentiment from transcribed customer calls," according to a company blog.

Google also announced a boost in capacity to its Dalles, Oregon data center, which is part of an overall data center expansion effort. In March, Google announced it was planning 12 new cloud data centers in the next 18 months.