IBM releases raft of Watson APIs to boost developer use

IBM says that Watson, its artificial-intelligence technology, will be setting up a second home in San Francisco early next year to be close to the innovators, startups and “disruptors” who are changing the face of business as we knew it. It opened an office in New York’s Silicon Alley with similar fanfare in January 2014.

And finally IBM has released a set of developer tools that “significantly reduce the time required to combine Watson APIs and data sets”.

Among the new language capabilities is the Watson Natural Language Classifier that helps developers to create products and apps that understand the intent and meaning of words to find answers that are more useful.

Another, IBM Watson Dialogue, makes for more personal interactions by enabling the supercomputer to communicate using the language style and vocabulary of the user. In this way, developers can assess trends and patterns to “get a more comprehensive view of what users are communicating to get the ‘big picture.'” For now, this API remains experimental.

IBM’s Watson will be a “huge engine” for sales as more businesses adopt the cognitive cloud computing technology, according to John Kelly, the company’s senior vice president for solutions portfolio and research.

Goyal explained how these types of applications can bring benefits to IBM Watson customers and developers.

One of the biggest brains on the internet has sought out help from an Irish sports performance company, with IBM’s Watson recruiting Orreco to develop some training apps. Indra Financial Services will now include this tool built with Watson Q&A, to provide users with real-time answers and expertise to customer enquiries, further improving operational efficiency for processing these banks’ card payments.

Today, Big Blue announced plans for what it’s calling Watson West, a new office and innovation center meant to introduce the rapidly growing Watson ecosystem to San Francisco area entrepreneurs and investors.

Touchcast is developing a new way for people to collaborate through an interactive video application for web conferencing that uses IBM Speech to Text to build a corpus of transcripts that can be instantly recalled after a meeting to facilitate knowledge management and collaboration.

To date, Saft said, there are 100 companies incorporating Watson in products or services that are already on the market.

Famous for its win on the television quiz program “Jeopardy” four years ago, Watson has undergone considerable evolvement. IBM calls its approach to A.I. The new set up has been created to showcase the new functionalities and practical tools that have been added into the Watson computing platform.

Join the conversation at #ibmwatson and #WatsonWest.