IBM Watson Developer Cloud offers self-service artificial intelligence

IBM has announced that its cognitive intelligence platform Watson has been upgraded with speech, vision and language capabilities, allowing developers to build smarter apps.

Watson, IBM‘s cognitive computer, is being used by advertisers to identify consumers’ personality traits from their tweets in order to help target ads.

IBM also advanced its services that enable cognitive applications to understand the ambiguities of natural language in the text.

On September 24, 2015, at IBM’s newly announced “Watson West” hub, the company unveiled it is making new Watson APIs available to developers, entrepreneurs and businesses.

The services are offered in the form of APIs (application programming interfaces) that are accessed via IBM’s Bluemix cloud development platform.

It also launched a “Watson hub” in San Francisco. The new cloud initiative comes in the wake of reports of declining revenues in 13 consecutive quarters, while the app economy is “in full swing”, as IBM described it, with industry revenue projected to grow to $143 billion in 2016, according to analyst IDC.

The new app powered by IBM Watson will be called Coach Watson.

Thousands of developers and commercial partners across dozens of different fields are using Watson APIs including new partners in the shape of 50wise, Volume and SocialBro and this is expected to extend even further with the new APIs.

While the new capabilities are all well and good, they aren’t a lot in work if developers don’t use them. IBM will continue investing into Watson start-ups from its own $100 million seed fund.

IBM has also made improvements to the Speech to Text and Text to Speech APIs, which would be useful for developing digital personal assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. IBM acquired Merge Healthcare thereby applying its cognitive approaches into X-rays, MRIs, angiograms, electrocardiograms and other images supporting in decision capability for treatment. At the time of the Jeopardy championship, Watson used a single API, known as Question & Answer, that had five underlying technologies: Natural language processing, machine learning, question analysis, feature engineering, and ontology analysis. Watson continuously learns, gaining in value and knowledge over time, from previous interactions. “We feel the urgency not only to turn around the business of IBM and help the business of IBM, but help our clients transform their industries”, said Kelly.

Join the conversation at #ibmwatson. Follow Watson on Facebook and see Watson on YouTube and Flickr.