IBM Expands Watson Platform for Next Generation of Builders; Extends Industry’s Largest Portfolio of Cognitive APIs

IBM announced:

- New cognitive APIs in the Watson Developer Cloud broaden Watson's language, speech, vision and data insights capabilities

- A new milestone as more than 100 Watson Ecosystem partners have now introduced cognitive enabled apps and products into the market

- New Watson West Facility delivers a new cognitive computing hub in San Francisco

IBM expanded the industry's largest and most diverse set of cognitive APIs in the Watson Developer Cloud (WDC) for developers who are creating products, services and applications embedded with Watson. New capabilities in the WDC include:

• Language:
  • Natural Language Classifier enables developers to build apps that understand intent and meaning, finding answers for users even when questions are asked in varying ways.
  • Dialog makes app interactions more natural by creating conversations tailored to the individual style a person uses to answer a question.
  • Retrieve & Rank improves QA information retrieval using machine learning to detect "signals" in data and help users uncover even the most hard to find information.
  • Concept Expansion enables an application to expand and relate concepts beyond the immediate text, drawing on the meaning of a word rather than simple text matching (initially in limited availability).
  • Document Conversion provides the ability to convert documents with input format (PDF, Word, HTML) to output formats (HTML, Text, JSON) needed for other Watson services, either synchronously or in batch (initially available as experimental).
• Speech: newly available tools optimize Speech to Text / Text to Speech services in numerous languages, including Japanese, Mandarin, Brazilian Portuguese - additional languages will be continually introduced.
• Vision:
  • Visual Insights for the first time allows developers to build apps that reveal insights from social media images and video to deliver deeper insights, and assess trends and patterns. (initially available as experimental).
• Data Insights: A new category of services that includes AlchemyDataNews and Tradeoff Analytics.

From a developer tool perspective, IBM is making available the first set of developer tools, called the Watson Knowledge Studio (WKS) that will significantly accelerate the training and adaption of Watson with specific industry and organizational domain knowledge. By leveraging state-of-the-art supervised machine learning techniques, developers and SMEs will now be able to use their own expertise to train Watson to understand the linguistic nuances, meaning and relationships in specific industries, professions and knowledge domains. Existing solutions, like Watson Explorer or Watson "Advisors" or WDC services, can leverage the knowledge imparted through the use of WKS so that insights can be identified more quickly and easily than ever before.

IBM also announced the intention:

• to create "data cartridges" that will allow businesses to quickly and easily draw upon industry specific content with unique taxonomies
• integrate Watson into next generation robotics

The Watson Ecosystem is building market momentum with more than 100 partners now in market. Partners are embedding Watson to differentiate their products and services in an increasingly competitive app economy. Here is a "sampling" of some of these partners:

• Card Payments and Financial Services: 50wise created is eVision tool, powered by Watson, to provide query support to card payment professionals. INDRA Financial Services will now include this tool to provide users with real-time answers and expertise to customer enquiries, further improving operational efficiency for processing the banks' credit payments. (Cognitive Service: Question / Answer)
• Student Career Counseling: Carney Labs is an education technology company that provides a platform to help schools learn about a student's personality characteristics in order to build them a career roadmap. The Commonwealth of Virginia adopted a policy for all high schools in the state to leverage this app to use with students entering their freshman year. (Cognitive Services: Language APIs)
• Research & Development: Inno360, an enterprise research and innovation management platform provider is embedding Watson into its SaaS platform to transform the way its clients, including Fortune 50 companies, conduct research and process big data. (Cognitive Services: 7 APIs for language / data insights)
• Wine Recommendations: VineSleuth's Wine4.me In-Store Advisor provides shoppers with individualized wine recommendations based on Watson's cognitive services and VineSleuth's proprietary object wine data generated by an expert team of sensory scientists, wine makers, educators and evaluators to remove subjective opinions. The Advisor allows consumers to easily share wine preferences and receive a customer list of suggested wines based on food pairing, prices range and similarity to another wine and/or specific flavor profile. (Cognitive Services: language and speech APIs)

The Watson West facility will be located at 505 Howard Street in San Francisco and will open in 2016. This new cognitive computing hub will serve as a regional technology hub for IBM's Watson business, offering local developers, startups / entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and academics greater access and collaboration opportunities to adopt and build on Watson's cognitive computing capabilities. The center will feature a Watson Experience Center - an interactive lab for clients and partners to work with Watson. IBM will host workshops and seminars to help accelerate third-part adoption and commercial applications.

Keywords: IBM Watson, Cloud Computing, Cognitive Computing, Speech to Text, Text to Speech, ARC Advisory Group.