IBM Watson is famous for the development of machine learning and language cognitive computing. There are many entrepreneurs who already use Watson in their businesses. There is also Watson Cloud. What is it? And how can you use it?
IBM Watson Developer Cloud is a service for developers who can use Watson’s Software Developer Kits for building cognitive applications quicker and smarter. The service is available on IBM Bluemix. It’s an open source environment for easy application management. Here are the main reasons to use IBM Bluemix:
- Easy enterprise markets reaching
- Services monetization being an IBM Marketplace business partner
- A single-pane portal for controlling all services
- Enterprise-class application capabilities
- A flexible infrastructure
What’s Bluemix?
If you represent a big company that needs a bunch of services and applications, you will like Bluemix’s dashboard that makes monitoring of all services and apps easy. Beside functioning as a common PaaS, Bluemix offers additional services like a possibility to pull data outside APIs, 24/7 customer support, and the access to different self-service resources and forums. IBM Bluemix uses Java so you can try a different solution for custom apps. Database storage works with MySQL and PostgreSQL. If you are comfortable with other languages, at Github, developers may find SDK for adding Watson services using Unity, Node.js, Python, ASP.Net, etc.
The Watson Developer Cloud was launched in 2013. Till the beginning of 2015, this service has already attracted more than 5,000 users and become the basis for developing 6,000 apps. Watson Cloud provides developers with a variety of smart services. They may be classified into the following groups: language, speech, vision, and data insights. Let’s start with language services.
1. AlchemyLanguage
Use AlchemyLanguage APIs for analyzing text. This is a natural language processing technique that understands keywords, sentiment, entities, etc. Using entity extraction, concept tagging, and taxonomy classification, with AlchemyLanguage, brands can improve their relationships with clients. Brands can test the effect of certain publications on their reputation. AlchemyLanguage allows predicting what content clients will like most of all.
Pulsar, a social intelligence software applications and services provider, used Alchemy API for data analysis. In one month they’ve analyzed 20-30 million documents. As a result, Pulsar expanded product lines and accelerated R&D.
2. Concept Insights
These IBM Watson Developer Cloud services allow users to understand which documents are related. Concept Insights is a platform for content exploration and recommendation. Inputting text and a set of documents, you get related documents and a list of concepts mentioned in the input document. A time saver!
3. Conversation
With IBM Watson developer cloud services, you may create chatbots, power robots with natural language recognition, make other devices understand natural language. Combining machine learning and natural language understanding, Watson Conversation serves as a platform for better communication with your clients.
Other useful language services include Dialog, Document Conversion, Language Translation, and Tone Analyzer. With these services data analysis brings the best results one can imagine. As every enterprise needs to analyze gigabytes of information, IBM Watson Cloud proves to be of the first importance.
What services can Watson offer?
Watson Developer Cloud also includes speech services: Speech to Text and Text to Speech. Speech to Text Api transcribes audio and speech. Text to Speech API synthesizes text into a natural speech.
In order to make analysis complete, Watson Cloud offers some Vision services: AlchemyVision, Visual Insights, and Visual Recognition. Deep learning algorithms of these services allow you identify objects, faces, text, and scenes in images.
Taking into account all those services, you may think about different spheres for using them. Let’s start with having a look at several services that use Watson services. For example, News Intelligence is used for analyzing social media and making a conclusion concerning your company reputation. I’ve typed IBM. Here’s what I’ve got.
The next app I’ve tried out is Conversational Agent. Using such Watson Cloud services as Dialog and Natural Language Classifier, this app helps you find movies via chatting. Though the app looks good and proves to be a nice chatbot, it still has some disadvantages like the inability to understand some information. Still, it’s just an example app that shows the results you can get using Watson Cloud.
What apps are created with Watson services?
Check yourself what apps you can create with Watson Developer Cloud. For example, Nests allows one to find a home in the US. It was created with Tradeoff Analytics, a service that uses mathematical filtering for making a decision when there are many criteria.
Another good example of using Watson Cloud services is NYC School Finder. Using Personality Insights and Tradeoff Analytics, the app finds the best school for your kid. Analyzing a piece of text describing your child, the app makes a conclusion concerning your child’s personality. Then it offers you a list of schools that may suit the best. The service also offers potential careers. This technology seems to be so powerful. Even if you don’t want to choose a school, you may use it for finding out what profession is the best for you.
At Letzgro, we create apps using such innovative technologies as cognitive computing and machine learning. Don’t hesitate to contact us! Ready to provide you with more interesting information about Watson Developer Cloud and ideas on how to use its services.
