Competitors include:

* Azure Cognitive Services (REST-based)

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...

* Amazon ML (REST-based), including Polly, Rekognition etc.

https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/?nc2=h_l3_ai

AI-as-a-Service is a interesting space that is likely to grow over time.

Part of the problem with doing AI in-house is that it's really hard/expensive to get large corpuses of correctly labeled data to train your algorithms on, so what these folks are really selling is a set of trained model weights exposed as an API.