There have been readily available machine learning toolkits available for decades--if you want to use a SVM in your project, you just need to grab an implementa

There have been readily available machine learning toolkits available for decades--if you want to use a SVM in your project, you just need to grab an implementation and get going. The trick, as others have described, is getting your data into a usable format, choosing features, and experimenting to find the method that gives the best results. As far as I can tell, the Prediction API doesn't do much to make any of that easier.