Artificial intelligence is having a moment.

Startups that claim to be using AI are attracting record levels of investment. Big tech companies are going all-in, draining universities of entire departments. Nearly 140 AI companies have been acquired since 2011, including 40 this year alone.

AI is showing up in our everyday lives, as voice-recognition technology in our devices and image recognition in our Facebook and Google accounts.

Now, Google parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are making some of their smarts available to other businesses, on a for-hire basis. Want to make your app or gadget respond to voice commands, and answer in its own “voice?” These services can do that. Need to transcribe those conversations so they can be analyzed? This new breed of services can do this and many other things, from face recognition to identifying objectionable content in images.

But wringing measurable utility from these new AI toys can be hard. “Everyone wants to think the AI spring is going to blossom into the AI summer, but I think it’s 10 years away,” says Angela Bassa, head of the data-science team at energy-intelligence-software company EnerNOC Inc.