11 ms·

New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more

203 points by jsstylos 12y ago

pesenti 12y ago
Some context on the new services. They are built on technology that comes from IBM Research and has been moved into the Watson group in 2014. Some like speech, have been developed for more than 50 years. None of these technologies have overlap with the Watson Jeopardy stack (except for the Watson voice). We will release that stack later this year as a series of services allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog application. All the Watson services are still in beta but will start going GA very soon (first one next month). If you have any questions, please fire up, the Watson team is ready to answer.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago
  Text-to-speech is very impressive. Thanks!
- ubercore 12y ago
  Are you working on any audio (non-speech) analysis services? I have no particular usecase in mind, but it's an area I'm always interested in!
  - picheny 12y ago
    We have worked on audio analytics in the past for things such as outdoor sound detection and vehicle identification. We are currently focusing on speech-based analytics such as language ID and affect recognition. The statistical methodologies we are using for speech are easily extended to such domains. We hope that by puuting out these initial speech services we will get feedback from the community about related problems and welcome your suggestions.
  - JimBlizz 12y ago
    You might want to check out Echonest's API - http://developer.echonest.com/ http://developer.echonest.com/
- pgeorgi 12y ago
  > allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog application. > If you have any questions, please fire up, the Watson team is ready to answer. So that's what you built Watson for :-)
  - pesenti 12y ago
    We'd love to do an automated AMA. We are not yet there but if the community provided some training data I believe it's within reach. Give us a couple of years!
    - josu 12y ago
      Is the Watson platform dependent on the hardware, or do you keep updating the hardware that it runs on?
      - pesenti 12y ago
        Given that our strategy is to expose most Watson technology as cloud services we will keep updating the hardware underneath in a way that seamless to the user. We try to leverage the Power architecture as much as possible.
        josu 12y ago
        Thanks, that's what I had assumed, however seeing the hardware behind Watson on Jeopardy threw me off [1]. I'm guessing that that was just the first stage. [1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/IBM-Watson.jpg http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/IBM-Watson.jpg
        picheny 12y ago
        Yeah it was. At the risk of waxing about old history, when we demoed the first large vocabulary speech recognition system back in 1984 it ran on a bunch of IBM mainframes. Within two years it was running on a PC with some special purpose cards. Today much more powerful recognizers run locally on smartphones. We have always found we can shrink something down once we solve the basic problem, and it is important not to let computational limitations prevent you from seeing the best solution.
- jcfrei 12y ago
  Do any of the Watson services allow for feedback to train them?
  - keelyw 12y ago
    Yes, all services include a feedback API, and the demos also include a mechanism for providing feedback. As an example, see 4th paragraph in this doc, which also includes a link to the API docs: http://ibm.co/1yNfztF http://ibm.co/1yNfztF And here's a link to the demo, see the "Give us feedback" link: http://bit.ly/1EJllDF http://bit.ly/1EJllDF
  - picheny 12y ago
    We want feedback on all our services. If you are speaking about using data to update the service, I know the speech services do not yet have this capability.
- kastnerkyle 12y ago
  What techniques are being used for text to speech? Is is something deep learning related or more standard HMM synthesis? Any paper references?
  - cypher543 12y ago
    According to the documentation[1], it's a concatenative synthesizer using decision trees for prosody modeling and PSOLA for output. [1]: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/text-to-speech/#research http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
    - kastnerkyle 12y ago
      Thanks! I am working in this area and have some ideas for deep learning type methods which move away from concatenative synthesis. It will be nice to compare to what they are using.
      - woodson 12y ago
        This paper (from ICASSP2013) may be of interest to you: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/40837.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
      - picheny 12y ago
        We did some work on applying NNs to prosody prediction; see Fernandez, Raul, et al. "Prosody contour prediction with long short-term memory, bi-directional, deep recurrent neural networks." Proceedings of the Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH). 2014.
- frik 12y ago
  Do you plan to open source some of your stuff (voice recognition, speech synthesis, gazetteers, UIMA related code)? Watson Jeopardy itself is built on top of Apache open source stack (Apache UIMA and Hadoop): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIMA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIMA
  - picheny 12y ago
    honestly we have not gotten that far yet - at least on the speech technology side. Good discussion to have.
- Caligula 12y ago
  I find it terribly confusing. It does not explain what instances are, do I need an instance to access some of the services? I just want to access some services via API from my own servers. I think the documentation is not that good, there should be curl examples at least. For instance, for the STT or TTS include some curl examples. Does the STT have speaker identification or does it output text in one stream? I tried to access: https://gateway-s.watsonplatform.net:8443/speech-to-text-beta/api https://gateway-s.watsonplatform.net:8443/speech-to-text-bet... I used my bluemix l/p. It did not work. Are there other api credentials that are needed?
  - jsstylos 12y ago
    Yes, the API credentials for the service are different from the Bluemix login. To get the API credentials, you have to create a service through Bluemix, bind it to a Bluemix application and get the credentials from the VCAP_SERVICES of that Bluemix app. There's a getting started page describing these steps at http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/getstarted.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl... (We hope to make this process simpler in the future!)
    - Caligula 12y ago
      Thanks. Also, Does the STT have speaker identification/diaritization or does it output all merged text in one stream?
      - germanattanasio 12y ago
        The code that is being used in the demo: https://speech-to-text-demo.mybluemix.net https://speech-to-text-demo.mybluemix.net is in the watson-developer-cloud organization in github: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/speech-to-text-nodejs https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/speech-to-text-nod... In fact, all the samples have the code there.
      - vaibhava72 12y ago
        At present it does not do diarization, all text is output in one stream.
- devniel 12y ago
  Great, I'm waiting for it, actually I can't do so much with the preloaded domain on Q&A service.
bkeroack 12y ago
Pricing page (which they don't make easy to find): https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing When this was first announced I remember reading about their pricing model where they would take a percentage of app revenue. I'm glad to see they offer flat pay-as-you-go pricing now. Some of the Watson services are intriguing.
ConfuciusSay 12y ago
Now you can buy back stock algorithmically in the cloud!
SlipperySlope 12y ago
Compare the Watson text-to-speech voices with Nuance ... Watson http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/ Nuance http://www.nuance.com/for-business/text-to-speech/vocalizer/index.htm#demo http://www.nuance.com/for-business/text-to-speech/vocalizer/... I prefer the Watson version voicing a sample paragraph. Both are good enough for an application that selects on price. For a voice-first application, maybe Watson is better for TTS. For speech to text, Nuance has been the leader, e.g. Apple's Siri. Has anyone compared IBM speech recognition to Nuance, Microsoft & Google?
- jp8000 12y ago
  I believe that the Nuance technology is built on IBM Speech research: http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-solution/customer-service-solutions/strategic-partners-overview/ibm/index.htm http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-solution/customer-serv...
- AustinG08 12y ago
  My evidence is anecdotal at best, but I have found Siri to be terrible and my "OK, Google" to be wonderful.
  - picheny 12y ago
    As a speech technologist, I am amazed and proud about how far long the technology has progressed, especially over the last few years. Even my wife now uses speech input on mobile devices (and may finally think I may be doing something productive...). With that said, speech input is still a surprisingly finicky technology and different people will see different beahviors across systems from different providers.
    - AustinG08 12y ago
      I can only imagine how finicky it is. But it is truly amazing tech, and quite revolutionary. I probably do about 75%+ of my searches via voice, and it would more likely be 90%+ if I wasn't embarrassed about talking to my phone in public and broadcasting my searches to anyone in earshot :P
bhuga 12y ago
The text-to-speech is actually a little nicer than Siri or Cortana, but not groundbreaking. This was the only one of the 5 that I thought did well. The rest might have been better without demo pages. For visual recognition, I used a picture of a snowmobile from http://www.1888goodwin.com/2013/11/14/what-do-you-need-to-do-to-drive-a-snowmobile-in-michigan/ http://www.1888goodwin.com/2013/11/14/what-do-you-need-to-do..., which it identified with 73% confidence as "Invertebrate". Speech to text is a parody twitter account waiting to happen. Here's me asking it how it does with technical transcription: How do you doing technical words. If you were going to have to talk about get an jute cushion pull. And you wanted to discuss the impact on a file server memory. Issues that cross processes talk about home forks rivers slowed difficult.
- jp8000 12y ago
  Make sure you use a headset, not your laptop's microphone.
  - iandanforth 12y ago
    That's not a reasonable requirement. It only sounds like one to you because the technology has been so bad for so long.
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - pesenti 12y ago
      Smartphone microphones are much better than laptop microphones and pretty much on par with using headsets on a laptop - they represent our primary use case.
    - picheny 12y ago
      Well, I don't think the technology is that bad :-). But I agree with you. We have to solve the problem of poorer quality audio input, and the sooner the better! But there are also many scenarios where good audio input is feasible and would like feedback on those sorts of application ideas too.
humanfromearth 12y ago
I tried using Watson a month ago without much success. I wanted to do a classification of some random text, and say that this text for example is this category. But as far as I could understand it only allows using their own datasets. It's not possible to train their service with your data, unlike wit.ai for example. Seems obvious to me that people would want to train with their own data.
- pesenti 12y ago
  Pretty much all the services that we are releasing will have some adaptation capabilities - allowing you to provide your own data, create your own models, etc - at some point. Stay posted.
cabirum 12y ago
Visual recognition has some room for improvement http://i.imgur.com/V59IeQH.png http://i.imgur.com/V59IeQH.png
- aroopPandya 12y ago
  hey, try changing the classifier from "All" to "Scene". It does much better.. and stay tuned we will release some more api's on top of visual recognition to allow for image labeling..
niels_olson 12y ago
In other news, Watson will be RA'd at the end of the month.
- johnward 12y ago
  If anyone is not going to be RA'd it's Watson group. There is a lot riding on the success of Watson.
  - CrazyCatDog 12y ago
    Agreed, it's hard to find any other marketable IP in IBM's portfolio.
    - mmf 12y ago
      Care to provide some backing info on your statement? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_patent_recipients http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_paten...
      - warkdarrior 12y ago
        He said "marketable IP" (i.e., "useful IP") not "patentable IP".
      - blumkvist 12y ago
        I think that was sarcasm.
      - Crito 12y ago
        I'm pretty sure it was sarcasm. IBM is infamous for their massive patent portfolio. Just about anybody who knows about patents knows that IBM has a metric ton of them.
  - panzagl 12y ago
    Yeah, unfortunately the Watson's group problem is going to be keeping the life raft from being being swamped by everyone else on the ship. If we see 'Rational Watson Powered by WebSphere' we'll know they didn't swing the oars hard enough...
Poiesis 12y ago
Two things that jumped out at me: 1. No "special characters" allowed in passwords when creating an account. 2. ...where's the REST API? I've "added a service" (TTS), but I have to write a webapp to expose it over HTTP? It sure is a different experience than your typical API documentation.
- aroopPandya 12y ago
  take a look @ https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc.... There is also doc link once you click on the service you have bounded. There are samples in java and nodejs. (samples coming soon in github)
  - Poiesis 12y ago
    I did indeed take a look at the docs. That's why I commented. If there's documentation of REST end points, it's not obvious to me. Maybe someone else will point out what I'm missing. As far as I can tell, most of the documentation essentially begins, "First, deploy a web app on our platform". Which is fine I guess, but isn't nearly as simple as the HTTP APIs you see from many other recent SaaS providers. As least for me, I'm pretty unlikely to jump through those hoops. Maybe others will be different. Edit: All the way down on the bottom of the documentation page, past the research references, there's a link to HTTP API documentation--literally the last link on the page.
- jsstylos 12y ago
  1. This is good feedback, thanks. 2. The rest API docs are at https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/apis/#!/text-to-speech https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc... You can call the service directly, though the samples show using an http webapp as a proxy to avoid exposing private service credentials. We're still working on the documentation, so feedback is helpful here. What other service REST API docs do you like, just out of curiosity? What are the features that makes that documentation useful?
jsstylos 12y ago
I'm on the Watson team and we're interested in learning from developers to make our APIs and documentation easier to use. Have feedback? We'd love to hear it. jsstylos@us.ibm.com Twitter: @jsstylos
corin_ 12y ago
@IBM people: Is there any information available yet either regarding future pricing, or regarding timeline for getting pricing information?
- johnward 12y ago
  Someone else posted this but here is the bluemix pricing page: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing
  - _delirium 12y ago
    That gives the pricing for running compute instances on BlueMix, but at the moment there's no pricing for these Watson services, since they're free-while-in-beta. Presumably post-beta there will be some kind of charge per N queries, like the other out-of-beta services (e.g. the Business Rules service charges $1.00 per 1000 API calls), but there's not currently an indication of when that's likely to happen and/or the likely price range.
qeorge 12y ago
I've been uploading the easiest photos I can find to the visual recognition demo[1], and its yet to get one right. For example, I searched Google for "photo of girl", and found this image which seems very easy: http://www.wagggsworld.org/shared/uploads/img/rachel-s-p-photo.jpg http://www.wagggsworld.org/shared/uploads/img/rachel-s-p-pho... Watson says: Color 71% Human 67% Photo 65% Dog 59% Person 57% Placental_Mammal 56% Animal 50% Long_Jump 50% Huh? This isn't me cherry picking bad results; aside from their demos I'm not finding any photos that are accurately classified. I even tried a headshot of a person isolated on a white background, and Watson told me I uploaded a photo of "shoes". Seriously - how is this data useful? What could I build with this level of accuracy? Watson team - do you agree? Is this product about to get a lot better, soon, or is this considered "pretty good"? [1] http://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/
- pesenti 12y ago
  The top 3 classes in your example are actually correct - it is a color photo of a human. But we expect it to get much better over time. Only real world usage will allow us to make real improvement - and that's why we are eager to release early. We are also believe that the first applications (e.g., classifying animals or plants or landmarks in dedicated apps) will have narrower use case that give better accuracy.
  - deleted 12y ago
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  - deleted 12y ago
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    - germanattanasio 12y ago
      I just tried with a Taj Mahal picture and It works. http://goo.gl/C8cLWp http://goo.gl/C8cLWp
      - 12y ago
taf2 12y ago
How do I signup and pay them money?
- tparikh 12y ago
  Watson services on Bluemix are currently in beta. You can use the beta services at no charge, even after your 30 day Bluemix trial, although you will need to provide a credit card to Bluemix. You will not incur any charges unless you use any of the production services.
harisamin 12y ago
This is great! There was a startup JetPacCity (acquired by Google) that was doing some CNN for image recognition, mostly on the mobile client side. They had open sourced their lib: https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK
karmacondon 12y ago
So the gist of what I'm seeing in this thread is, "Watson's API services aren't very good yet, but they will get better as it collects and processes more data". So basically, IBM is charging us to provide it with training data to make Watson useful for practical applications. Makes sense, but I can't help but feel that it would be a smarter move to skip charging entirely for now, or to use drastically reduced pricing tiers that exist only for the purpose of preventing abuse. The idea of releasing a product like this with less than impressive demos is a bit of a risk. It's not going to encourage people to use it if the demos aren't compelling, and the demos won't be compelling until a lot of people are using it. I'd err on the side of optimism here, it'll probably work out for the best, but it will be interesting to see how this goes and provide a good case study. My other thought is that if IBM can't get sufficient training data on their own, what hope do the rest of us have? Performing classification on arbitrary data is a herculean task. People could throw literally anything at this api and will expect to get common sense results, it's nearly impossible and pushing the boundaries of what even cutting edge software can do. But if a company like IBM spends billions of dollars and their demos still end up generating mostly confusion and complaints... This kind of open ended "AI" might be more difficult than even the most conservative experts thought. EDIT: As an after thought, the real value here isn't so much software as it is pooled training data. Facebook has been able to identify human faces in photos for years, speech-to-text and concept modelling have all been around for a long time. What's difficult is getting the labelled data necessary to distinguish between "is this a picture of a person or a picture of a cat?". Watson is great and it seems like IBM has made an investment in acquiring and collecting the data necessary to do that. But their big play here might be to build a consumer friendly enough product that their users contribute the rest of that data for them over the next several years, building an aggregate data set that is worth as much or more than the software itself. Again, will be interesting to see how it plays out.
- jsstylos 12y ago
  All of the Watson services are free in beta. (Bluemix, through which the services are accessed, requires a credit card after 30 days, but doesn't charge you for use of the beta Watson services.) We wanted to get the services into peoples hands early, even though we're still working on them, rather than wait until we had a perfect product. There's a tradeoff here, but we figure that we can improve the services faster and better with public usage and feedback than we could in private isolation. Since they're free, hopefully people will be able to have some fun playing around with the services, also!
z3phyr 12y ago
This >>Speech to Text : This application only works in recent versions of Chrome supporting HTML5 audio capture
- picheny 12y ago
  Yeah, Chrome currently seems to have the best support for audio capture.....
X-combinator 12y ago
The future is HERE!
FrankenPC 12y ago
Text to speech is pretty good. http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/?cm_mmc=developerWorks-_-dWdevcenter-_-watson-_-lp http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/?cm_mmc=developerWo... I decided to test it a little. I copied phonem challenges and non-sensical phrasing from the web. Then I added some stuff that I know has problems from past experience. ----- Let's explore some complicated conversions, shall we? The old corn cost the blood. The wrong shot led the farm. The short arm sent the cow. How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend? Don't desert me here in the desert!. They were too close to the door to close it. The buck does funny things when does are present. Today is 1/1/2015. Today is Jan 5th, 1992. It's currently half past 12. Or 12:30PM. Twenty thousand dollars. 20,000 dollars. 20 thousand dollars. 2^5 = 32. NASA is an acronym. This ... is a pause. EmailAddress@somedomain.com.
davegolland 12y ago
Interesting! We over at Prismatic released our interest tagging API just yesterday ( http://blog.getprismatic.com/interest-graph-api/ http://blog.getprismatic.com/interest-graph-api/ ). Seems like there's a lot of opening up APIs going around.
enricobruschini 12y ago
I've been developing a product with Watson from within the Partner Ecosystem, some of those capabilities are pretty useful. Others, sometimes, are kind of confusing, creating a broad overpopulated constellation of Watson-based APIs inside Bluemix.
anonbanker 12y ago
Can we all just drop the charade and start calling Watson SkyNet already?
Kronopath 12y ago
The text-to-speech is surprisingly good, but I'm amazed at one thing, and not in a good way: the Spanish voice can't pronounce the word "Español". It pronounces it as "Espanol" with a hard "n" sound. In fact, it seems to pronounce all "ñ"s as "n"s. How that kind of an oversight got into the system, I'll never know. Did no one think to check? Edit: And to add insult to injury, the English voices do pronounce "Español" correctly!
- vaibhava72 12y ago
  Fixed.
jcoffland 12y ago
Don't pay a company to do what can be done with a library.

203 points by jsstylos 12y ago

Some context on the new services. They are built on technology that comes from IBM Research and has been moved into the Watson group in 2014. Some like speech, have been developed for more than 50 years. None of these technologies have overlap with the Watson Jeopardy stack (except for the Watson voice). We will release that stack later this year as a series of services allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog application. All the Watson services are still in beta but will start going GA very soon (first one next month). If you have any questions, please fire up, the Watson team is ready to answer.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago
Text-to-speech is very impressive. Thanks!
ubercore 12y ago
Are you working on any audio (non-speech) analysis services? I have no particular usecase in mind, but it's an area I'm always interested in!
- picheny 12y ago
  We have worked on audio analytics in the past for things such as outdoor sound detection and vehicle identification. We are currently focusing on speech-based analytics such as language ID and affect recognition. The statistical methodologies we are using for speech are easily extended to such domains. We hope that by puuting out these initial speech services we will get feedback from the community about related problems and welcome your suggestions.
- JimBlizz 12y ago
  You might want to check out Echonest's API - http://developer.echonest.com/ http://developer.echonest.com/
pgeorgi 12y ago
> allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog application. > If you have any questions, please fire up, the Watson team is ready to answer. So that's what you built Watson for :-)
- pesenti 12y ago
  We'd love to do an automated AMA. We are not yet there but if the community provided some training data I believe it's within reach. Give us a couple of years!
  - josu 12y ago
    Is the Watson platform dependent on the hardware, or do you keep updating the hardware that it runs on?
    - pesenti 12y ago
      Given that our strategy is to expose most Watson technology as cloud services we will keep updating the hardware underneath in a way that seamless to the user. We try to leverage the Power architecture as much as possible.
      - josu 12y ago
        Thanks, that's what I had assumed, however seeing the hardware behind Watson on Jeopardy threw me off [1]. I'm guessing that that was just the first stage. [1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/IBM-Watson.jpg http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/IBM-Watson.jpg
        picheny 12y ago
        Yeah it was. At the risk of waxing about old history, when we demoed the first large vocabulary speech recognition system back in 1984 it ran on a bunch of IBM mainframes. Within two years it was running on a PC with some special purpose cards. Today much more powerful recognizers run locally on smartphones. We have always found we can shrink something down once we solve the basic problem, and it is important not to let computational limitations prevent you from seeing the best solution.
jcfrei 12y ago
Do any of the Watson services allow for feedback to train them?
- keelyw 12y ago
  Yes, all services include a feedback API, and the demos also include a mechanism for providing feedback. As an example, see 4th paragraph in this doc, which also includes a link to the API docs: http://ibm.co/1yNfztF http://ibm.co/1yNfztF And here's a link to the demo, see the "Give us feedback" link: http://bit.ly/1EJllDF http://bit.ly/1EJllDF
- picheny 12y ago
  We want feedback on all our services. If you are speaking about using data to update the service, I know the speech services do not yet have this capability.
kastnerkyle 12y ago
What techniques are being used for text to speech? Is is something deep learning related or more standard HMM synthesis? Any paper references?
- cypher543 12y ago
  According to the documentation[1], it's a concatenative synthesizer using decision trees for prosody modeling and PSOLA for output. [1]: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/text-to-speech/#research http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
  - kastnerkyle 12y ago
    Thanks! I am working in this area and have some ideas for deep learning type methods which move away from concatenative synthesis. It will be nice to compare to what they are using.
    - woodson 12y ago
      This paper (from ICASSP2013) may be of interest to you: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/40837.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
    - picheny 12y ago
      We did some work on applying NNs to prosody prediction; see Fernandez, Raul, et al. "Prosody contour prediction with long short-term memory, bi-directional, deep recurrent neural networks." Proceedings of the Annual Conference of International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH). 2014.
frik 12y ago
Do you plan to open source some of your stuff (voice recognition, speech synthesis, gazetteers, UIMA related code)? Watson Jeopardy itself is built on top of Apache open source stack (Apache UIMA and Hadoop): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIMA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIMA
- picheny 12y ago
  honestly we have not gotten that far yet - at least on the speech technology side. Good discussion to have.
Caligula 12y ago
I find it terribly confusing. It does not explain what instances are, do I need an instance to access some of the services? I just want to access some services via API from my own servers. I think the documentation is not that good, there should be curl examples at least. For instance, for the STT or TTS include some curl examples. Does the STT have speaker identification or does it output text in one stream? I tried to access: https://gateway-s.watsonplatform.net:8443/speech-to-text-beta/api https://gateway-s.watsonplatform.net:8443/speech-to-text-bet... I used my bluemix l/p. It did not work. Are there other api credentials that are needed?
- jsstylos 12y ago
  Yes, the API credentials for the service are different from the Bluemix login. To get the API credentials, you have to create a service through Bluemix, bind it to a Bluemix application and get the credentials from the VCAP_SERVICES of that Bluemix app. There's a getting started page describing these steps at http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/getstarted.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl... (We hope to make this process simpler in the future!)
  - Caligula 12y ago
    Thanks. Also, Does the STT have speaker identification/diaritization or does it output all merged text in one stream?
    - germanattanasio 12y ago
      The code that is being used in the demo: https://speech-to-text-demo.mybluemix.net https://speech-to-text-demo.mybluemix.net is in the watson-developer-cloud organization in github: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/speech-to-text-nodejs https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/speech-to-text-nod... In fact, all the samples have the code there.
    - vaibhava72 12y ago
      At present it does not do diarization, all text is output in one stream.
devniel 12y ago
Great, I'm waiting for it, actually I can't do so much with the preloaded domain on Q&A service.

bkeroack 12y ago

Pricing page (which they don't make easy to find): https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing When this was first announced I remember reading about their pricing model where they would take a percentage of app revenue. I'm glad to see they offer flat pay-as-you-go pricing now. Some of the Watson services are intriguing.

ConfuciusSay 12y ago

Now you can buy back stock algorithmically in the cloud!

SlipperySlope 12y ago

Compare the Watson text-to-speech voices with Nuance ... Watson http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/ Nuance http://www.nuance.com/for-business/text-to-speech/vocalizer/index.htm#demo http://www.nuance.com/for-business/text-to-speech/vocalizer/... I prefer the Watson version voicing a sample paragraph. Both are good enough for an application that selects on price. For a voice-first application, maybe Watson is better for TTS. For speech to text, Nuance has been the leader, e.g. Apple's Siri. Has anyone compared IBM speech recognition to Nuance, Microsoft & Google?

jp8000 12y ago
I believe that the Nuance technology is built on IBM Speech research: http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-solution/customer-service-solutions/strategic-partners-overview/ibm/index.htm http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-solution/customer-serv...
AustinG08 12y ago
My evidence is anecdotal at best, but I have found Siri to be terrible and my "OK, Google" to be wonderful.
- picheny 12y ago
  As a speech technologist, I am amazed and proud about how far long the technology has progressed, especially over the last few years. Even my wife now uses speech input on mobile devices (and may finally think I may be doing something productive...). With that said, speech input is still a surprisingly finicky technology and different people will see different beahviors across systems from different providers.
  - AustinG08 12y ago
    I can only imagine how finicky it is. But it is truly amazing tech, and quite revolutionary. I probably do about 75%+ of my searches via voice, and it would more likely be 90%+ if I wasn't embarrassed about talking to my phone in public and broadcasting my searches to anyone in earshot :P

bhuga 12y ago

The text-to-speech is actually a little nicer than Siri or Cortana, but not groundbreaking. This was the only one of the 5 that I thought did well. The rest might have been better without demo pages. For visual recognition, I used a picture of a snowmobile from http://www.1888goodwin.com/2013/11/14/what-do-you-need-to-do-to-drive-a-snowmobile-in-michigan/ http://www.1888goodwin.com/2013/11/14/what-do-you-need-to-do..., which it identified with 73% confidence as "Invertebrate". Speech to text is a parody twitter account waiting to happen. Here's me asking it how it does with technical transcription: How do you doing technical words. If you were going to have to talk about get an jute cushion pull. And you wanted to discuss the impact on a file server memory. Issues that cross processes talk about home forks rivers slowed difficult.

jp8000 12y ago
Make sure you use a headset, not your laptop's microphone.
- iandanforth 12y ago
  That's not a reasonable requirement. It only sounds like one to you because the technology has been so bad for so long.
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  - pesenti 12y ago
    Smartphone microphones are much better than laptop microphones and pretty much on par with using headsets on a laptop - they represent our primary use case.
  - picheny 12y ago
    Well, I don't think the technology is that bad :-). But I agree with you. We have to solve the problem of poorer quality audio input, and the sooner the better! But there are also many scenarios where good audio input is feasible and would like feedback on those sorts of application ideas too.

humanfromearth 12y ago

I tried using Watson a month ago without much success. I wanted to do a classification of some random text, and say that this text for example is this category. But as far as I could understand it only allows using their own datasets. It's not possible to train their service with your data, unlike wit.ai for example. Seems obvious to me that people would want to train with their own data.

pesenti 12y ago
Pretty much all the services that we are releasing will have some adaptation capabilities - allowing you to provide your own data, create your own models, etc - at some point. Stay posted.

cabirum 12y ago

Visual recognition has some room for improvement http://i.imgur.com/V59IeQH.png http://i.imgur.com/V59IeQH.png

aroopPandya 12y ago
hey, try changing the classifier from "All" to "Scene". It does much better.. and stay tuned we will release some more api's on top of visual recognition to allow for image labeling..

niels_olson 12y ago

In other news, Watson will be RA'd at the end of the month.

johnward 12y ago
If anyone is not going to be RA'd it's Watson group. There is a lot riding on the success of Watson.
- CrazyCatDog 12y ago
  Agreed, it's hard to find any other marketable IP in IBM's portfolio.
  - mmf 12y ago
    Care to provide some backing info on your statement? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_patent_recipients http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_paten...
    - warkdarrior 12y ago
      He said "marketable IP" (i.e., "useful IP") not "patentable IP".
    - blumkvist 12y ago
      I think that was sarcasm.
    - Crito 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure it was sarcasm. IBM is infamous for their massive patent portfolio. Just about anybody who knows about patents knows that IBM has a metric ton of them.
- panzagl 12y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately the Watson's group problem is going to be keeping the life raft from being being swamped by everyone else on the ship. If we see 'Rational Watson Powered by WebSphere' we'll know they didn't swing the oars hard enough...

Poiesis 12y ago

Two things that jumped out at me: 1. No "special characters" allowed in passwords when creating an account. 2. ...where's the REST API? I've "added a service" (TTS), but I have to write a webapp to expose it over HTTP? It sure is a different experience than your typical API documentation.

aroopPandya 12y ago
take a look @ https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc.... There is also doc link once you click on the service you have bounded. There are samples in java and nodejs. (samples coming soon in github)
- Poiesis 12y ago
  I did indeed take a look at the docs. That's why I commented. If there's documentation of REST end points, it's not obvious to me. Maybe someone else will point out what I'm missing. As far as I can tell, most of the documentation essentially begins, "First, deploy a web app on our platform". Which is fine I guess, but isn't nearly as simple as the HTTP APIs you see from many other recent SaaS providers. As least for me, I'm pretty unlikely to jump through those hoops. Maybe others will be different. Edit: All the way down on the bottom of the documentation page, past the research references, there's a link to HTTP API documentation--literally the last link on the page.
jsstylos 12y ago
1. This is good feedback, thanks. 2. The rest API docs are at https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/apis/#!/text-to-speech https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc... You can call the service directly, though the samples show using an http webapp as a proxy to avoid exposing private service credentials. We're still working on the documentation, so feedback is helpful here. What other service REST API docs do you like, just out of curiosity? What are the features that makes that documentation useful?

jsstylos 12y ago

I'm on the Watson team and we're interested in learning from developers to make our APIs and documentation easier to use. Have feedback? We'd love to hear it. jsstylos@us.ibm.com Twitter: @jsstylos

corin_ 12y ago

@IBM people: Is there any information available yet either regarding future pricing, or regarding timeline for getting pricing information?

johnward 12y ago
Someone else posted this but here is the bluemix pricing page: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing
- _delirium 12y ago
  That gives the pricing for running compute instances on BlueMix, but at the moment there's no pricing for these Watson services, since they're free-while-in-beta. Presumably post-beta there will be some kind of charge per N queries, like the other out-of-beta services (e.g. the Business Rules service charges $1.00 per 1000 API calls), but there's not currently an indication of when that's likely to happen and/or the likely price range.

qeorge 12y ago

I've been uploading the easiest photos I can find to the visual recognition demo[1], and its yet to get one right. For example, I searched Google for "photo of girl", and found this image which seems very easy: http://www.wagggsworld.org/shared/uploads/img/rachel-s-p-photo.jpg http://www.wagggsworld.org/shared/uploads/img/rachel-s-p-pho... Watson says: Color 71% Human 67% Photo 65% Dog 59% Person 57% Placental_Mammal 56% Animal 50% Long_Jump 50% Huh? This isn't me cherry picking bad results; aside from their demos I'm not finding any photos that are accurately classified. I even tried a headshot of a person isolated on a white background, and Watson told me I uploaded a photo of "shoes". Seriously - how is this data useful? What could I build with this level of accuracy? Watson team - do you agree? Is this product about to get a lot better, soon, or is this considered "pretty good"? [1] http://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/

pesenti 12y ago
The top 3 classes in your example are actually correct - it is a color photo of a human. But we expect it to get much better over time. Only real world usage will allow us to make real improvement - and that's why we are eager to release early. We are also believe that the first applications (e.g., classifying animals or plants or landmarks in dedicated apps) will have narrower use case that give better accuracy.
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  - germanattanasio 12y ago
    I just tried with a Taj Mahal picture and It works. http://goo.gl/C8cLWp http://goo.gl/C8cLWp
    - 12y ago

taf2 12y ago

How do I signup and pay them money?

tparikh 12y ago
Watson services on Bluemix are currently in beta. You can use the beta services at no charge, even after your 30 day Bluemix trial, although you will need to provide a credit card to Bluemix. You will not incur any charges unless you use any of the production services.

harisamin 12y ago

This is great! There was a startup JetPacCity (acquired by Google) that was doing some CNN for image recognition, mostly on the mobile client side. They had open sourced their lib: https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK

karmacondon 12y ago

So the gist of what I'm seeing in this thread is, "Watson's API services aren't very good yet, but they will get better as it collects and processes more data". So basically, IBM is charging us to provide it with training data to make Watson useful for practical applications. Makes sense, but I can't help but feel that it would be a smarter move to skip charging entirely for now, or to use drastically reduced pricing tiers that exist only for the purpose of preventing abuse. The idea of releasing a product like this with less than impressive demos is a bit of a risk. It's not going to encourage people to use it if the demos aren't compelling, and the demos won't be compelling until a lot of people are using it. I'd err on the side of optimism here, it'll probably work out for the best, but it will be interesting to see how this goes and provide a good case study. My other thought is that if IBM can't get sufficient training data on their own, what hope do the rest of us have? Performing classification on arbitrary data is a herculean task. People could throw literally anything at this api and will expect to get common sense results, it's nearly impossible and pushing the boundaries of what even cutting edge software can do. But if a company like IBM spends billions of dollars and their demos still end up generating mostly confusion and complaints... This kind of open ended "AI" might be more difficult than even the most conservative experts thought. EDIT: As an after thought, the real value here isn't so much software as it is pooled training data. Facebook has been able to identify human faces in photos for years, speech-to-text and concept modelling have all been around for a long time. What's difficult is getting the labelled data necessary to distinguish between "is this a picture of a person or a picture of a cat?". Watson is great and it seems like IBM has made an investment in acquiring and collecting the data necessary to do that. But their big play here might be to build a consumer friendly enough product that their users contribute the rest of that data for them over the next several years, building an aggregate data set that is worth as much or more than the software itself. Again, will be interesting to see how it plays out.

jsstylos 12y ago
All of the Watson services are free in beta. (Bluemix, through which the services are accessed, requires a credit card after 30 days, but doesn't charge you for use of the beta Watson services.) We wanted to get the services into peoples hands early, even though we're still working on them, rather than wait until we had a perfect product. There's a tradeoff here, but we figure that we can improve the services faster and better with public usage and feedback than we could in private isolation. Since they're free, hopefully people will be able to have some fun playing around with the services, also!

z3phyr 12y ago

This >>Speech to Text : This application only works in recent versions of Chrome supporting HTML5 audio capture

picheny 12y ago
Yeah, Chrome currently seems to have the best support for audio capture.....

X-combinator 12y ago

The future is HERE!

FrankenPC 12y ago

Text to speech is pretty good. http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/?cm_mmc=developerWorks-_-dWdevcenter-_-watson-_-lp http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/?cm_mmc=developerWo... I decided to test it a little. I copied phonem challenges and non-sensical phrasing from the web. Then I added some stuff that I know has problems from past experience. ----- Let's explore some complicated conversions, shall we? The old corn cost the blood. The wrong shot led the farm. The short arm sent the cow. How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend? Don't desert me here in the desert!. They were too close to the door to close it. The buck does funny things when does are present. Today is 1/1/2015. Today is Jan 5th, 1992. It's currently half past 12. Or 12:30PM. Twenty thousand dollars. 20,000 dollars. 20 thousand dollars. 2^5 = 32. NASA is an acronym. This ... is a pause. EmailAddress@somedomain.com.

davegolland 12y ago

Interesting! We over at Prismatic released our interest tagging API just yesterday ( http://blog.getprismatic.com/interest-graph-api/ http://blog.getprismatic.com/interest-graph-api/ ). Seems like there's a lot of opening up APIs going around.

enricobruschini 12y ago

I've been developing a product with Watson from within the Partner Ecosystem, some of those capabilities are pretty useful. Others, sometimes, are kind of confusing, creating a broad overpopulated constellation of Watson-based APIs inside Bluemix.

anonbanker 12y ago

Can we all just drop the charade and start calling Watson SkyNet already?

Kronopath 12y ago

The text-to-speech is surprisingly good, but I'm amazed at one thing, and not in a good way: the Spanish voice can't pronounce the word "Español". It pronounces it as "Espanol" with a hard "n" sound. In fact, it seems to pronounce all "ñ"s as "n"s. How that kind of an oversight got into the system, I'll never know. Did no one think to check? Edit: And to add insult to injury, the English voices do pronounce "Español" correctly!

vaibhava72 12y ago
Fixed.

jcoffland 12y ago

Don't pay a company to do what can be done with a library.