Firebase is a mobile and web application development platform that provides backend services and was acquired by Google in 2014. It now has 18 products used by 1.5 million apps. Firebase ML Kit is a mobile SDK that uses Google's machine learning expertise to add features like text recognition, face detection, and custom model deployment to Android and iOS apps with just a few lines of code. Key capabilities of ML Kit include production-ready APIs for common use cases, on-device or cloud processing, and deploying custom TensorFlow Lite models.