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Coincidentally I spent the last couple of hours playing with Watson's services (I was looking for a decent Speech-to-Text API for a toy project). Marketing asi

Coincidentally I spent the last couple of hours playing with Watson's services (I was looking for a decent Speech-to-Text API for a toy project). Marketing aside, I must say that BlueMix's user interface is the worst. thing. ever. Buggy, extremely slow, fragmented, with cryptic error messages[1]. Took me 45+ minutes to reactivate my account (the old one was kindly deleted due to inactivity), and create the the TTS/STT services endpoints. Funny; after all the investment to develop Watson, you'd think UI would be the easiest part to get it right. On the positive side, the TTS and STT APIs are simply a pleasure to work with. The documentation is excellent, accuracy is pretty good, and the demos are spot on. Plus you have support for streaming audio through WebSocket for STT (which is a must for my project), and a few voices to chose from for TTS. [1] http://imgur.com/3s4KUPv http://imgur.com/3s4KUPv

douche 10y ago
Good lord, are the IBM websites bad... It's taken me almost a full day just to successfully download some DB2 or Sametime SDKs, by the time I'd drilled down through the labyrinth of their non-google-indexed download site, had to generate an account, wait for that to actually be created, then snake my way back down to the download I wanted in the first place,
wrp 10y ago
Can someone point me to description of Watson's sentence realization API? I guess it could be called the semantics-to-text part. Realizers like FUF/SURGE, KPML/Nigel, and RealPro are quite complex to use. SIMPLENLG and OpenCCG are simpler, but the results I saw were not impressive. The demos of Watson are quite good, so I'm really interested to see how it performs on operations more complex than delivering factoids.
pesenti 10y ago
We are very aware of the Bluemix usability issues and are working with that team to address them. Did you try the new Bluemix by any chance? Thanks for the kind comments on our APIs. We are really trying hard to make them usable.
- guiambros 10y ago
  I tested the new UI yesterday, and initially thought it was equally bad: too slow to be usable, couldn't figure out where things were, etc. But I just tested again today, and the slowness is gone, so maybe it was an isolated incident. I was able to play with it a bit more, add services, create a few containers, etc. Definitely an improvement versus the classic interface. I'm still getting used to the logic grouping and how to access your services (I'm coming from years of AWS / Google Cloud), but the ability to go back-and-forth quickly helps a lot. Minor nitpick: any reason for API icon to be pink instead of blue, like all others? I keep looking at it as if it were a different state (e.g., "activated").

douche 10y ago

Good lord, are the IBM websites bad... It's taken me almost a full day just to successfully download some DB2 or Sametime SDKs, by the time I'd drilled down through the labyrinth of their non-google-indexed download site, had to generate an account, wait for that to actually be created, then snake my way back down to the download I wanted in the first place,

wrp 10y ago

Can someone point me to description of Watson's sentence realization API? I guess it could be called the semantics-to-text part. Realizers like FUF/SURGE, KPML/Nigel, and RealPro are quite complex to use. SIMPLENLG and OpenCCG are simpler, but the results I saw were not impressive. The demos of Watson are quite good, so I'm really interested to see how it performs on operations more complex than delivering factoids.

pesenti 10y ago

We are very aware of the Bluemix usability issues and are working with that team to address them. Did you try the new Bluemix by any chance? Thanks for the kind comments on our APIs. We are really trying hard to make them usable.

guiambros 10y ago
I tested the new UI yesterday, and initially thought it was equally bad: too slow to be usable, couldn't figure out where things were, etc. But I just tested again today, and the slowness is gone, so maybe it was an isolated incident. I was able to play with it a bit more, add services, create a few containers, etc. Definitely an improvement versus the classic interface. I'm still getting used to the logic grouping and how to access your services (I'm coming from years of AWS / Google Cloud), but the ability to go back-and-forth quickly helps a lot. Minor nitpick: any reason for API icon to be pink instead of blue, like all others? I keep looking at it as if it were a different state (e.g., "activated").