Next-Level Search: Discover the Game-Changing Capabilities of Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder
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In our conversations with customers, few generative AI use cases have driven as much enthusiasm as generative search. Leaders at enterprises know the limits of traditional enterprise search, with queries producing a list of links based on pattern matching, and significant manual investigation required to find the more relevant answers. In generative AI, these leaders see an opportunity to leverage their data more effectively and deeply, including applying it to conversational apps that can answer complex questions, produce accurate summaries that synthesize many sources, and help people get the information they need, faster.
Enterprise Search on Generative AI App Builder (Gen App Builder) lets organizations create custom chatbots and semantic search applications in as little as a few minutes, with minimal coding needed to get started and enterprise-grade management and security built in. Customers can combine their internal data with the power of Google’s search technologies and generative foundation models, delivering relevant, personalized search experiences for enterprise applications or consumer-facing websites.
To date, most approaches to combining generative AI and search technology have been inadequate for the scale and reliability needed for enterprise use. For example, building search by breaking long documents into chunks and feeding each segment into an AI assistant typically isn’t scalable and doesn’t effectively provide insights across multiple sources. Likewise, many solutions are limited in the data types they can handle, prone to errors, and susceptible to data leakage. Bespoke, do-it-yourself approaches are generally no easier, with production-grade solutions often requiring complex tasks like integrating embeddings data with foundation models and significant use case data testing. Even when organizations make these efforts, the resulting solutions still tend to lack feature completeness and reliability, with significant investments of time and resources required to achieve high-quality results.
These challenges demonstrate that to effectively implement generative search, organizations typically need more than access to powerful foundation models. They also likely need the ability to ground model outputs in specific data, so that outputs are more relevant and less likely to include mistakes or “hallucinations.” They generally need safeguards that protect their data, how it is accessed, and how it is used. And they generally need the process to be high-performant and scalable out of the box, making the functionality easy to use even if the organization lacks data science and machine learning expertise.
Let’s look at how Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder helps customers bypass these scale and reliability challenges, so they can start leveraging generative search quickly.
The intersection of generative AI and enterprise data
Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder lets developers create search engines that help ground outputs in specific data sources for accuracy and relevance, can handle multimodal data such as images, and include controls over how answer summaries are generated. Multi-turn conversations are supported so that users can ask follow up questions as they peruse outputs, and customers have control over their data—including the ability to support HIPAA compliance for healthcare use cases. All of this is available as a fully managed service, so developers can focus on building rather than cloud complexity.
Gen App Builder’s out-of-box capabilities can remove the need for data chunking, generating embeddings, or managing indexes, hiding complexity behind a straightforward interface that lets developers build apps in minutes with little or no coding and no prior machine learning experience. With the ability to ingest large volumes of documents and support for both unstructured and structured data, apps built with Gen App Builder help customers solve the long-standing headache of finding relevant information across the organization, turning tasks that used to take hours into quick searches or conversational explorations with an app.
These capabilities are underpinned by both Google’s foundation models and a variety of Google Search technologies, including:
- Semantic search, which helps deliver more relevant results than traditional keyword-based search techniques by using natural language processing and machine learning techniques to infer relationships within the content and intent from the user’s query input.
- Google’s understanding of how users search for information.
- Google’s expertise in understanding relevance, which considers factors such as content popularity and user personalization of content when determining the order in which search results are displayed.
For more advanced use cases, Gen App Builder can be easily integrated with Vertex AI for in-depth foundation model tuning, enabling flexible input and output search formats.
As always with our AI products, Gen App Builder has been evaluated for alignment with our AI Principles, which is reflected by the product’s many safeguards against bias, toxic content, and unhelpful outputs. Whether for prototypes built in minutes or apps with many custom components, Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder offers a robust suite of user-friendly tools for customers across industries and levels of expertise.
How customers are innovating with Enterprise Search
After gaining access to Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder via our trusted tester program, a number of customers are already leveraging the product for novel use cases.
Priceline is harnessing Gen App Builder and Vertex AI for a range of projects, including internal search engines for employees and a new chatbot to assist customers as they make travel plans. Slated to be available across both desktop and mobile experiences, Priceline’s chatbot will help customers find the right information faster via always-on, personalized experiences, including answering nuanced questions like, “What are the best 4-star hotel options in midtown Manhattan within walking distance to Central Park?” and “Can you help me extend my hotel reservation for an additional night?”
“Priceline is charting a course to transform the novelty of generative AI into lasting value for our customers and our business. We believe it’s not just about having the latest technology; it’s also about practically targeting innovation to the right challenges and opportunities,” said Marty Brodbeck, Chief Technology Officer, Priceline. “With Google Cloud as our AI innovation partner, we’re doubling down on our commitment to delivering the fastest, most seamless and informative booking experience for our customers, from personalized planning and travel inspiration to customer service.”
Vodafone is experimenting with Enterprise Search and foundation models on Gen App Builder to build a tool that can rapidly and securely query documents, search, and understand specific commercial terms and conditions. Vodafone Voice and Roaming Services has over 10,000 contracts with other telecommunications companies worldwide, in a variety of formats such as PDFs, images, and complex tables. Searching this document repository is often a time consuming process for employees.
“Every day we introduce and manage new services like 5G to a roaming footprint comprising more than 700 operators in 210 countries to ensure both Vodafone and our partners’ business customers, holidaymakers, and Internet of Things devices stay connected when abroad. With Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder, we are building an intelligent assistant to securely and quickly search contracts.” said Sherif Bakir, CEO of Vodafone Voice and Roaming Services. “With generative AI, we’re accelerating otherwise protracted processes, increasing productivity and operational efficiency.”
Software startup Trender.ai, which creates customer monitoring and intelligence solutions for B2B relationships, is using Gen App Builder to build a product that can synthesize information from social media, public sources, and CRM data so that users can form more productive, personal relationships with prospects and customers.
“With Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder, we have been able to do things in the last month that we had projected to take 12-18 months on our prior roadmap,” said Betsy Bilhorn, co-founder at Trender.ai. “We had expected it would take at least 12 months to build and train models from an individual’s public social, web, and other data, and to then be able to ask questions like ‘What things are most important to this person?’ or ‘When and how is the best way to make an introduction to this prospect that they’ll respond to?’ Last year, we thought getting to this vision was a bit of a moonshot for a startup our size — but now we were able to achieve this in under a month.”
Stop searching for solutions — start discovering insights
We’re excited to see how customers use Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder to leverage data in powerful ways, discover new insights, and create useful, personal, and efficient experiences.
Today, we’re pleased to help our customers accomplish these goals, with the general availability of Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder for customers on the allowlist (i.e., approved for access). Please contact your Google Cloud sales team for access and pricing details. We are also launching two new features within Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder that are available today in our preview offering: multi-turn search, which supports asking follow-up questions, and content recommendations to find semantically relevant content. Access to the preview offering is available via Google Cloud’s trusted tester program. Read more about Enterprise Search on Gen App Builder and sign up for access on our webpage.
We’re also bringing generative AI features of Enterprise Search to our existing solutions like Contact Center AI and Document AI. As an example, starting this month, customers can preview generative AI-powered search in Document AI Warehouse. To keep up with our latest generative AI news, don’t miss The Prompt or our generative AI primer for executives on Transform with Google Cloud.
Apollo24|7 partnered with Google Cloud to build the Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) together
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Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) is an important technology for the healthcare industry that analyzes data to help healthcare professionals make decisions related to patient care. The market size for the global clinical decision support system appears poised for expansion, with one study predicting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.4%, from 2022 to 2030, to $10.7 billion.
For any health organization that wants to build a CDSS system, one key block is to locate and extract the medical entities that are present in the clinical notes, medical journals, discharge summaries, etc. Along with entity extraction, the other key components of the CDSS system are capturing the temporal relationships, subjects, and certainty assessments.
At Google Cloud, we know how critical it is for the healthcare industry to build CDSS systems, so we worked with Apollo 24|7, the largest multi-channel digital healthcare platform in India, to build the key blocks of their CDSS solution.
We helped them to parse the discharge summaries and prescriptions to extract the medical entities. These entities can then be used to build a recommendation engine that would help doctors with the “Next Best Action” recommendation for medicines, lab tests, etc.
Let’s take a sneak peek at Apollo 24|7’s entity extraction solutions, and the various Google AI technologies that were tested to form the technology stack.
Datasets Used
To perform our experiments on entity extraction, we used two types of datasets.
- i2b2 Dataset – i2b2 is an open-source clinical data warehousing and analytics research platform that provides annotated deidentified patient discharge summaries made available to the community for research purposes. This dataset was primarily used for training and validation of the models.
- Apollo 24|7’s Dataset – De-identified doctor’s notes from Apollo24|7 were used for testing. Doctors annotated them to label the entities and offset values.
Experimentation and choosing the right approach — Four models put to test
For entity extraction, both Google Cloud products and open-source approaches were explored. Below are the details:
- Healthcare Natural Language API: This is a no-code approach that provides machine learning solutions for deriving insights from medical text. Using this, we parsed unstructured medical text and then generated a structured data representation of the medical knowledge entities stored in the data for downstream analysis and automation. The process includes:
- Extract information about medical concepts like diseases, medications, medical devices, procedures, and their clinically relevant attributes;
- Map medical concepts to standard medical vocabularies such as RxNorm, ICD-10, MeSH, and SNOMED CT (US users only);
- Derive medical insights from text and integrate them with data analytics products in Google Cloud.
The advantage of using this approach is that it not only extracts a wide range of entity types like MED_DOSE, MED_DURATION, LAB_UNIT, LAB_VALUE, etc, but also captures functional features such as temporal relationships, subjects, and certainty assessments, along with the confidence scores. Since it is available on Google Cloud, this offers long-term product support. It is also the only fully-managed NLP service among all the approaches tested and hence, it requires the least effort to implement and manage.
But one thing to keep in mind is that since the Healthcare NL API offers natural language models that are pre-trained, it currently cannot be used for custom entity extraction models trained using custom annotated medical text or to extract custom entities. This has to be done via AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare, another Google Cloud service for custom model development. Custom model development is important for adapting the pre-trained models to new languages or region-specific natural language processing, such as medical terms whose use may be more prevalent in India than in other regions
- Vertex AutoML Entity Extraction for Healthcare: This is a low-code approach that’s already available on Google Cloud. We used AutoML Entity Extraction to build and deploy custom machine learning models that analyzed documents, categorized them, and identified entities within them. This custom machine learning model was trained on the annotated dataset provided by the Apollo 24|7 team.
The advantage of AutoML Entity Extraction is that it gives the option to train on a new dataset. However, one of the prerequisites to keep in mind is that it needs a little pre-processing to capture the input data in the required JSONL format. Since this is an AutoML model just for Entity Extraction, it does not extract relationships, certainty assessments, etc.
- BERT-based Models on Vertex AI: Vertex AI is Google Cloud’s fully managed unified AI platform to build, deploy, and scale ML models faster, with pre-trained and custom tooling. We experimented with multiple custom approaches based on pre-trained BERT-based models, which have shown state-of-the-art performance in many natural language tasks. To gain better contextual understanding of medical terms and procedures, these BERT-based approaches are explicitly trained on medical domain data. Our experiments were based on BioClinical BERT, BioLink BERT, Blue BERT trained on Pubmed dataset, and Blue BERT trained on Pubmed + MIMIC datasets.
The major advantage of these BERT-based models is that they can be finetuned on any Entity Recognition task with minimal efforts.
However, since this is a custom approach, it requires some technical expertise. Additionally, it does not extract relationships, certainty assessments, etc. This is one of the main limitations of using BERT-based models.
- ScispaCy on Vertex AI: We used Vertex AI to perform experiments based on ScispaCy, which is a Python package containing spaCy models for processing biomedical, scientific or clinical text.
Along with Entity Extraction, Scispacy on Vertex AI provides additional components like Abbreviation Detector, Entity Linking, etc. However, when compared to other models, it was less precise, with too many junk phrases, like “Admission Date,” captured as entities.
“Exploring multiple approaches and understanding the pros/cons of each approach helped us to decide the one that would fit our business requirements.” according to Abdussamad M, Engineering Lead at Apollo 24|7.
Evaluation Strategy
In order to match the parsed entity with the test data labels, we used extensive matching logic that comprised of the below four methods:
- Exact Match – Exact match captures entities where the model output and the entities in the test dataset match. Here, the offset values of the entities have also been considered. For example, the entity “gastrointestinal infection” that is present as-is in both the model output and the test label will be considered an “Exact Match.”
- Match-Score Logic – We used a scoring logic for matching the entities. For each word in the test data labels, every word in the model output is matched along with the offset. A score is calculated between the entities and based on the threshold, it is considered as a match.
- Partial Match – In this matching logic, entities like “hypertension” and “hypertensive” are matched based on the Fuzzy logic.
- UMLS Abbreviation Lookup – We also observed that the medical text had some abbreviations, like AP meaning abdominal pain. These were first expanded by doing a lookup on the respective UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) tables and then passed to the individual entity extraction models.
Performance Metrics
We used precision and recall metrics to compare the outcomes of different models/experiments.
Precision (also called positive predictive value) is the fraction of relevant instances among the retrieved instances, while recall (also known as sensitivity) is the fraction of relevant instances that were retrieved.
The below example shows how to calculate these metrics for a given sample.
Example sample: “Krish has fever, headache and feels uncomfortable”
Expected Entities: [“fever”, “headache”]
Model Output: [“fever”, “feels”, “uncomfortable”]
Thus,
Experimentation Results
The following table captures the results of the above experiments on Apollo24|7’s internal datasets.
Finally, the Blue BERT model trained on the Pubmed dataset had the best performance metrics with a 81% improvement on Apollo 24|7’s baseline mode with the Healthcare Natural Language API providing the context, relationships, and codes. This performance could be further improved by implementing an ensemble of these two models.
“With the Blue BERT model giving the best performance for entity extraction on Vertex AI and the Healthcare NL API being able to extract the relationships, certainty assessments etc, we finally decided to go with an ensemble of these 2 approaches,“ Abdussamad added.
Fast track end-to-end deployment with Google Cloud AI Services (AIS)
Google AIS (Professional Services Organization) helped Apollo24|7 to build the key blocks of the CDSS system.
The partnership between Google Cloud and Apollo 24|7 is just one of the latest examples of how we’re providing AI-powered solutions to solve complex problems to help organizations drive the desired outcomes. To learn more about Google Cloud’s AI services, visit our AI & ML Products page, and to learn more about Google Cloud solutions for health care, explore our Google Cloud Healthcare Data Engine page.
Acknowledgements
We’d like to give special thanks to Nitin Aggarwal, Gopala Dhar and Kartik Chaudhary for their support and guidance throughout the project. We are also thankful to Manisha Yadav, Santosh Gadgei and Vasantha Kumar for implementing the GCP infrastructure. We are grateful to the Apollo team (Chaitanya Bharadwaj, Abdussamad GM, Lavish M, Dinesh Singamsetty, Anmol Singh and Prithwiraj) and our partner team from HCL/Wipro (Durga Tulluru and Praful Turanur) who partnered with us in delivering this successful project. Special thanks to the Cloud Healthcare NLP API team (Donny Cheung, Amirhossein Simjour, and Kalyan Pamarthy).
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Google’s AutoML Vision Helps AES Fight Climate Change
Global warming is one of the big challenges of our times; if not the biggest challenge of our times, says Andres Gluski, President and CEO, AES, a Fortune 500 company that generates and distributes renewable energy in 15 countries to help end climate change.
AES relies on Google’s AutoML Vision to assess damage to its hundreds of wind turbines. It uses drones to inspect and photograph its turbines, but these drones typically take 30,000 images, and each one must be examined–which can be extremely time-taking.
With Google Cloud’s AutoML Vision, AES can use machine learning to auto-detect damage so that engineers can spend less time identifying damage and more time repairing it.
Google Unveils New Cloud Region in Delhi NCR to Power India’s Digitization
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In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open.
Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific.
What customers and partners are saying
Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region:
- InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
- Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
- HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.
- Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
- “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”
A global network of regions
Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.
With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.
Supporting India’s recovery with training and education
Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery.
Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.
Helping customers build their transformation clouds
Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.
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The Secret to Accelerated ML Model Training
As an infrastructure or a data science professional, it’s more critical than ever to keep abreast of the changes taking place to the infrastructure powering machine learning.
If we take a step back, we will realize that there’s been a tremendous amount of progress in machine learning in the last few years, resulting in multiple benefits including higher accuracy in speech and image recognition, for instance. This progress is in part due to the advances in the systems to train models.
One of these advances comes in the type of processors being leveraged to power ML. There’s been an evolution—from CPUs to GPUs to TPUs—each of which bring additional computational power.
Google Cloud TPUs allow data scientists to train their models at lightning speed on Google Cloud’s latest ML hardware.
In this video, you will see how to use your raw data to create different ML applications. More importantly, Zak Stone, Product Manager For TensorFlow and Cloud TPUs, Google Brain, will show you how to accelerate ML model training on TPUs using Google Cloud’s optimized, TensorFlow image classification code. Each step will be explained in detail.
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Baking Gets Sweeter: Build ML Models that Help Predict the Best Recipe!
Baking recipes and ML models have one thing in common—they follow a pattern. Machine Learning is all about finding pattern in data sets, you can predict what you are baking based on the core ingredients and their respective amounts! Bread, cake or cookies, watch the video to make you make your baking experiences and learning with ML sweeter.
AutoML Tables, a no-code Google Cloud tool for ML models analyzes data from the databases and spreadsheets to help creates an automatic stats and dashboard with lists of ingredients and their values to predict a new recipe. Watch more episodes from Making with Machine Learning.
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