WATSON and BlueMix
By: Singular Factory
Tags: English Posts, Apps

WATSON and BlueMix

Cognitive services on the Cloud

This time we got our hands on WATSON and BlueMix.

IBM has made a very interesting move in the online services scene, being the first one in providing a very extense set of services that can ease adding text, voice and image based natural human interfaces. Do you want to know more about the statue your are viewing and ask questions about it? Or maybe you want to place an order directly from your App? This might be the tool you are looking for.

But let’s first introduce what BlueMix and Watson exactly are:

BlueMix offer both a PaaS, IaaS or the evil twin of SaaS

BlueMix is IBM’s Platform and Infrastrucure as a service. If you are developing services for your Application or App, BlueMix offer both a PaaS (Platform as a Service if your App fits a predefined API), IaaS (Infraestructure as a Service, if you only need the machines) or the evil twin of SaaS (Service as a Service where each one offers a set of features that solve a certain problem). In that way, BlueMix is very similar to Google Cloud.

Watson are divided in four fields

Watson is a collection of artificial intelligence services, and they will run on BlueMix.

Let’s check what services Watson offers. They are divided in four fields:

Language

Language is the set of features related with classifying and extracting information from text. Translations, emulate dialogs and extract information. An ultra fast resume:

Alchemy language: This is the base if you are working with natural language processing. You will feed it with text (webpage, txt) and you can obtain entities, concepts, keywords, sentiment, etc.

Concept Expansion: In this case you can train Watson with large amounts of data, thanks to its pattern recognition you can detect common expressions and what they are related to, for example to know that “The Big Apple” refers to New York City.

Watson will then be able to chat to users and use the prewritten answers

Concept Insights: In this case you will be able to obtain items related to some concept, for example for making better recommendations and suggestions.

Dialog: This is the key component if you want to simulate a dialog. You can feed Watson with conversations, with questions and answers, Watson will then be able to chat to users and use the prewritten answers.

Document Conversion: A nice tool to convert text from an to different formats, specially if you want to extract information from PDFs, webpages, etc so that Watson could use it as a source later on.

You can train it to make Watson have different reactions

Language Translation: Exactly what it sounds like :)

Natural Language Classifier: This is a key component for any service that needs to analyze and understand text. You can train it to make Watson have different reactions, for example to give a prewriten answer or to place an order.

Personality Insights: is your best friend if you want to obtain personality characteristics from the input, like Agreeableness, Openness, Harmony, Practicality, Tradition, Excitement, etc. and adapt your dialogues or suggestions.

Relationship Extraction: Intended for obtaining relationships between concepts, finding reviews about your products, competitors intelligence, etc.

Retrieve and Rank: This component is necessary if you want to offer ranked suggestions or solutions to a problem, being it fixing a car, or choosing the most suitable smartpahone or pair of shoes.

Tone Analyzer: In a similar way to the personality insights, the tone analyzer asseses the tone of a text or conversation: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Joy, Sadness, Confident, etc.

Speech to Text. Texto to Speech.

Speech

This one is quite simple to understand, this set is meant to deal with voice recordings, converting Speech to Text and vice versa:

Speech to Text.

Texto to Speech.

Vision

In a similar way to Google Vision, Watson offers a set of computer vision capabilities:

Alchemy Vision: Think about the Alchemy component we saw in the Text section and apply it to processing images. This is a key compoment if you want Watson to understand a picture’s content and context. You can feed it with images and obtain tag descriptions or taxonomies, face detection (gender, age range, celebrity) and text recognition from the image.

Visual Insights: allows Watson to organize images in a hierarchical taxonomy, or create groups of images based on visual appearance or semantic context. For example, find me some wonderfull red shoes.

Visual Recognition: Last but not the least this component allows you to train and ask Watson questions like “What is in this image?”. Train it with positive and negative data sources and it will recognize the objects in the image.

Data Insight

Now we are talking about heavy stuff, if you dare to:

Alchemy Data News: Indexing the last 60 days and aobteining around 300k English language news and articles, this component will let you use this information in your Watson up-to-date solution without feeding it yourself..

By using math filtering techniques it provides a tool to explore alternatives with different criteria

Tradeoff Analytics: Math people, behold the service that will help you in your analytics. By using math filtering techniques it provides a tool to explore alternatives with different criteria like cost, risk, effiency and make your best decision.

The complete catalogue can be seen here.

Our experience

We were very excited about WATSON and the development posibilities it opens.

IBM provides mutiple SDKs, and from them, the one that I personally was most interested about was the Watson Unity SDK. I have to say that in concept it’s thoroughly defined, however it might need some fixes and tweaks to work like a charm. Providing a panel with the general configuration, you can add the services for your Application.

Watson reallly have the tools to create outstanding natural interfaces

Of course you first need to create a development account, an application account, and the services online on BlueMix. Then you can use your keys to connect to them.

Although this process is not so clear and the Interface on the SDK, the API and the BlueMix panels are different, once we figured out how to set up the tutorial example, we were able to make some tests in minutes.

Our results? Maybe it’s still to soon to have have out-of-the-box solution, and 30 free-service days might be too few to validate, but Watson reallly have the tools to create outstanding natural interfaces.

We will surely have an eye on Watson in the months to come :)