IBM’s Watson Services Power the Cognitive Computing Era

Darryl K. Taft

The Speech to Text service vastly improves the accuracy of speech-recognition technology, providing more opportunity to discover previously hidden insights in conversational, human-to-human speech. In addition to providing natural speech interfaces to applications, the API can be used to produce transcripts from speech that can be converted into text from multi-media files or conversational streams, capturing information for various business use cases. What’s unique about the service is the combination of breadth of language support (U.S. English, Spanish and Japanese) and telephony model support.

The Text to Speech service understands text and natural language to generate synthesized audio output, complete with appropriate cadence and intonation. This allows developers to interact more intuitively with mobile apps, making their Web, mobile and Internet of things (IoT) applications talk with a consistent voice across different interfaces, which will become increasingly important as users continue to interact with devices. Text to Speech synthesizes natural-sounding speech from text in U.S. English, U.K. English, Spanish, French, Italian and German.

The Language Translation service enables the high-quality translation and identification of the language in which the textual input was written. The service works across multiple domains, including News (targeted at news articles and transcripts, it translates English to and from French, Spanish, Portuguese or Arabic); Conversation (targeted at conversational colloquialisms, it translates English to and from French, Spanish, Portuguese or Arabic); and Patents (targeted at technical and legal terminology, it translates Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese or Korean to English).

The Tradeoff Analytics service helps users optimize their decisions while striking a balance between multiple, often conflicting, objectives. The service can be used to help make complex decisions like what mortgage to take or which laptop to purchase. Tradeoff Analytics uses Pareto filtering techniques to identify the optimal alternatives across multiple criteria. It then uses various analytical and visual approaches to help decision-makers explore the pros and cons of their alternatives.

The IBM Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to infer cognitive and social characteristics, including Big Five, Values and Needs, from communications that the user makes available, such as email, text messages, tweets, forum posts and more. By deriving cognitive and social preferences, the service helps users understand, connect to, and communicate with other people on a more personalized level. One of IBM’s partners—a developer with clients in the retail space—is using the service to understand the personality characteristics of shoppers providing an added layer of knowledge and insights about customers.

AlchemyLanguage offers 13 API functions as part of its text analysis service, each of which uses sophisticated natural language processing techniques to analyze content and add high-level semantic information. One of the services is a keyword-extraction facility capable of extracting keywords from any text, HTML or Web-based content. The service employs statistical algorithms and natural language processing to analyze data, extracting keywords that can be used to index content, generate tag clouds and more. Other services include sentiment analysis, relation extraction and text extraction.

AlchemyVision employs deep learning technology to understand a picture’s content and context. The services sees complex visual scenes in their entirety—without needing any textual clues—leveraging a holistic approach to understanding the multiple objects and surroundings in common smartphone photos and online images. This service gives e-commerce vendors the ability to track and measure everything in a campaign, including the images used, giving brands a competitive advantage when targeting customers and driving sales.

With AlchemyData News, businesses can bypass the manual process of reading and cataloging articles. Instead, they can query historical and real-time news and blog content enriched with national language processing (NLP) to understand trends, identify key events (such as company acquisitions), improve advertising performance, and automate the search and retrieval of content. The News API curates and organizes hundreds of thousands of published news stories from reputable content providers. It then allows users to build apps and products that query the data, along with NLP enrichments, to unlock new insights.