A dashboard showing Salesforce’s new Einstein Sentiment service. (Salesforce photo)

Salesforce is expanding its Einstein artificial intelligence services for developers writing apps on its platform, launching three new services that help marketers measure brand sentiment and even recognize pictures of objects.

The company plans to unveil the new services at its TrailheaDX conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. Salesforce has 4 million members of its developer community, according to the company, and those developers create apps that run on top of Salesforce’s basic customer-relationship management product to let users customize their tools with features specific to their company’s needs.

Last year, Salesforce introduced Einstein, which provides artificial intelligence capabilities to developers who lack the expertise to build those models themselves. Since then Salesforce has been adding various AI-related features such as Guidance, which predicts financial performance based on performance data, and Discovery, which can help users find the insightful needle in their haystack of data.

The new services will appeal to marketers who are looking for automated ways to answer a common question from their CEO: how are people experiencing our product?

  • Einstein Sentiment analyzes text on social media platforms or the reviews on Amazon.com in order to classify whether people love, hate, or are indifferent to your product. This lets you reach out to the haters with offers or support answers without having to read all those tweets yourself.
  • Einstein Intent is more focused on inbound communication to a business through support channels, but also analyzes text in hopes of properly routing and responding to a customer request. “It’s not just understanding what people are saying, but understanding what they mean,” said Sarah Franklin, senior vice president of developer relations at Salesforce.
  • Einstein Object Discovery is an image-recognition model that can be trained to recognize your product in the wild. Salesforce thinks product companies might use this service to recognize inventory levels at retail stores, but it can also be used to detect when someone is slamming your product on social media with just a photo, without mentioning the product name itself. “This is really important because if i’m a customer like Adidas, I might be able to see if a customer is talking about my brand” by detecting the image, Franklin said.”

It’s not clear how many developers are actually using Salesforce’s Einstein technologies in their apps, although the company said it had over 4,000 signups for Einstein Vision, a service that lets developers build image recognition features into their apps. But it’s another example of a major cloud services provider — a software-as-a-service company, in Salesforce’s case — extending artificial intelligence research that only large companies can afford to do at scale to its customers.

Salesforce also plans to announce the addition of new lessons in how to use development products from Atlassian and Github in its developer education programs, as well as better collaboration tools for teams of developers working on Salesforce apps.

[Editor’s Note: Salesforce is a GeekWire sponsor.]

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