21 ms·

Watson Services

362 points by harscoat 12y ago

ashhath 12y ago
For anyone that would like to leave feedback about what we can do to improve the API's feel free to leave your input here. Have at it!: https://trello.com/b/dXizfv9z/watson-developer-cloud https://trello.com/b/dXizfv9z/watson-developer-cloud
andrea_s 12y ago
For all the hype that surrounds this platform, the live demos are truly underwhelming...
- skorgu 12y ago
  Agreed. For kicks I dumped a bunch of dmr biographical material (Wired, NYT, his personal web page) into http://ibmlaser.mybluemix.net/siredemo.html http://ibmlaser.mybluemix.net/siredemo.html Some "PERSONS" it found, everything between '' is [sic]: 'C' 'Cobol' 'B begat C.' '”' (yes, a single fancy closing quote) 'engineer' '’ initials' '’70s' '“Jobs’ genius' Some of it is understandable given how annoying single-character identifiers are to parse and others are roughly reasonable in context. Even given some of those quirks I bet it would be useful if you had bajillions of pages (cough ediscovery cough) to search through instead of a few general-audience articles.
  - shrikant 12y ago
    For anyone else who wants to know, 'dmr' in parent post is Dennis Ritchie. (I knew this, but didn't make the association right away, and it's quite hard to search online for 'dmr')
    - TillE 12y ago
      Searching for 'dmr person' does the trick with Google. Top result, and a sidebar of Dennis Ritchie.
    - pdabbadabba 12y ago
      You should've asked Watson. Then you would have learned the truth: dmr is 's wear daily.
  - simias 12y ago
    Yeah it's pretty bad, even inputing a well written news article like this one: http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/oct/08/return-of-john-galliano-more-than-matter-of-style http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/oct/08/return-of-joh... ” PERSON its ORGANIZATION ’s Wear Daily PERSON shoulder pad DISEASE The rest is mostly correct (although random punctuation seems included at times) but it's nothing you couldn't get by word matching using a big dictionary. It reminded me to get tested for shoulder pads though, so there's that.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - pesenti 12y ago
      We have a bug with quotes/punctuation that we are fixing now (that account for 1 & 3). "its" is not necessarily a mistake, it likely refers to the owner. "shoulder pad" is a mistake due to the probabilistic nature of the algorithms used.
    - parsabg 12y ago
      FWIW I ran the article through AYLIEN's Text API and here's what I got: http://aylien.com/text-api-demo?text=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffashion%2F2014%2Foct%2F08%2Freturn-of-john-galliano-more-than-matter-of-style&tab=concepts&run=1 http://aylien.com/text-api-demo?text=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegua... (disclaimer: I'm the founder of AYLIEN)
  - pesenti 12y ago
    We have found a bug with character normalization (which messes up the parsing of the punctuation). We'll fix this today.
  - jonperl 12y ago
    Interesting, this service is a lot like http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/alchemylanguage http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/alchemylanguage
  - pesenti 12y ago
    We fixed the bug with punctuation. Can you try again?
    - skorgu 12y ago
      Took me a while but I retried. It's definitely better, to the point that I have to stretch a bit to find really bad errors. "B begat C" still makes it in as do a few similar ones but considering how pathological a case a single-letter identifier is I can forgive that. I assume because the identifiers aren't unique that they're returned in the underlying api as text locations. Hmm now I want to throw EDGAR data at this.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  I played with language recognition demo and learned that Polish is apparently German. Being born in Galicia[0], I guess I shouldn't be surprised... [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_%28Eastern_Europe%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_%28Eastern_Europe%29
  - pesenti 12y ago
    Sorry Polish is not one of the supported language yet: Arabic; Chinese (Simplified); Chinese (Traditional); Cyrillic; Danish; Dutch; English; Farsi; Finnish; French; German; Greek; Hebrew; Hindi; Icelandic; Italian; Japanese; Korean; Norwegian (Bokmal); Norwegian (Nynorsk); Portuguese; Spanish; Swedish; Turkish; Urdu.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Oh right, I'm sorry. It was actually written on the demo page, but I somehow missed it.
    - johnward 12y ago
      I also imagine that distinguishing between many of these languages is not a trivial task for a computer to handle.
      - TillE 12y ago
        You'd get collisions if you're trying to determine the language of a single word, obviously. But a sentence or two should be no problem. You're just matching words in a dictionary. Different languages are mostly quite distinct. It would be a more interesting challenge to recognize and understand, say, German dialects.
        a3_nm 12y ago
        In fact you can already get very good results, even without a dictionary, just with a distribution of the trigrams in your input languages (which is immediate to compute from a corpus). Just compute the distribution of the sample and return the language that has the closest one.
pesenti 12y ago
This is the first batch of APIs that my team - the Watson Developer Cloud team - is exposing through IBM BlueMix for everybody to try and use. We have many more APIs in the pipeline but we decided to come out quickly with a small set to start with. We are trying get some early feedback from the developer community on what they find useful, what they'd like to see, how the APIs are designed, the quality of the documentation and example code, etc. Comments and questions are very welcome!
- philbarr 12y ago
  I have some questions: - It says, "During the BETA period, all Watson Services will be available for free on Bluemix." So what are the prices after the beta period? I can't put the time into learning this if it's not viable after the beta. - What is Bluemix? Is it just the "place where all the services are?"
  - zrail 12y ago
    Bluemix is IBM's implementation of CloudFoundry, an open-source Heroku-like platform-as-a-service. Presumably they're making this API available as an add-on to Bluemix applications.
    - pridkett 12y ago
      That's correct. These APIs are some of the many services you can attach to your applications within BlueMix.
  - pesenti 12y ago
    1. Right now we are working on a revenue sharing basis with the start ups that sign up as ecosystem partners (they also have access to more capabilities). http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/ibm-sees-salvation-in-watsons-new-york-home/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/ibm-sees-salvation-in-watso... has a few examples of these start ups and you can sign up here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.h.... We will likely come up with a pay-per-call model that's compelling for start ups as well. 2. BlueMix is the IBM PaaS - it has a lot of powerful services beyond Watson - http://bluemix.net http://bluemix.net. It allows you to create and deploy apps in the cloud.
philbarr 12y ago
It seems that to get a true "wow" moment out of this, you would need to use the services in combination, but there is no demo of this. Each demo looks like nothing more than a database search of the training data - no super amazing algorithms supplied. Perhaps IBM could provide an example "wow" moment to inspire us?
- pesenti 12y ago
  The demos are really made to demonstrate some basic input/output usage. Combination apps are indeed where we think developers will find the most value. We plan to have an app gallery to show that soon. Thanks for the suggestion.
  - philbarr 12y ago
    Could you describe a potential "wow" app, and how you would use the combination of services to achieve it? To get me salivating for more?
    - tucson 12y ago
      create a persona that can have a conversation with people see the movie "Her" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ how many people will fall in love with Watson?
      - thisjepisje 12y ago
        Let's call it Emma Watson then.
        joshmn 12y ago
        I already do, and don't think I'm alone...
    - aameek 12y ago
      To give an example ... Here is what a retail partner is building with these services around specialized marketing: They have (or get) a user's twitter handle, feed the content authored by the user into the user modeling service and based on the characteristics, send appropriate coupons/offers (e.g. very adventurous or less so etc). Combining that with the machine translation & language identification services, they are able to broaden this to many more languages vs. just English. The part that they are doing next is: with the community of their users, they want to check the potential resonance of their marketing messages to those users, which they do with the Message Resonance service. Based on that, they can pick the most likely to be resonant message before sending it to the user.
tempodox 12y ago
There seems to be a lot of context missing. I can't for the life of me come up with a simple example that demonstrates these services' value to me.
- aameek 12y ago
  See my response to philbarr above about a retail partner. Here is another example related to recruitment. Often we have a need to hire that we identify with another model employee (e.g. wouldnt it be great, if I had a dev like John from TeamX). With the User Modeling service, we had a Hackathon team create a beautiful app where you can ask questions like these and comparing the characteristics of candidates to John, it can find similar matches (of course done in the context of matching skills)
bolaft 12y ago
How do these services work, compsci-wise? Could someone link a few IBM publications explaining how the Question & Answer API works? That would be very helpful. The documentation pages explain nothing.
- pesenti 12y ago
  Good suggestions. Most of these have published papers, we'll add that to the documentation soon. In the meantime you can read an overview of the Watson Jeopardy system here: http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php.
  - bolaft 12y ago
    Thanks, that would be great.
- pridkett 12y ago
  The research group within IBM that's working on the question and answer portion of Watson is called DeepQA. You can check out lots of information about the team, including publications, at http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_subpage.php?id=2159 http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_subpa...
  - bolaft 12y ago
    Thanks for the info.
- jlas 12y ago
  Some of these services definitely draw from the area of Natural Language Processing [1] and Semantic Analysis [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_analysis_(machine_learning) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_analysis_(machine_lear...
  - bolaft 12y ago
juretriglav 12y ago
The language detection failed to work (it identified it as tr-TR) with these words for Slovene: jabolko hruška sliva marelica drevo dež mleko malo preveč majhno veliko This works perfectly on the first result on Google for "language identification", however: https://open.xerox.com/Services/LanguageIdentifier https://open.xerox.com/Services/LanguageIdentifier Edit: I now see Slovene is not supported, apologies are in order.
- ArjenM 12y ago
  Noticed it does not find Frisian, but then again neither does Google. It just gives random guesses every time.
  - pesenti 12y ago
    As mentioned in other comments, this language is not yet supported. But it would be better to return "unknown" rather than guessing, so we'll look into that.
2close4comfort 12y ago
So I can feed Watson public info about someone and it can make recommendations...for travel like the example, maybe preference of beverage, or custom dictionary words/terms that would be associated with this relevant information. Like a custom dictionary customized to an individual with a little alpha/numeric replacement and some special chars thrown in...wait I have to go ask Watson a couple of questions.
thewarrior 12y ago
I tried the Relation Ship demo on the first paragraph of an HN frontpage story : https://imgur.com/7XYnttk https://imgur.com/7XYnttk It obviously has some way to go .
- pesenti 12y ago
  Sorry we have a bug with character normalization which messes up punctuation parsing. That accounts for most of the mistakes here ("its" is not a mistake, it refers to the owner). Here is the fixed output: Adobe ORGANIZATION Digital Editions ORGANIZATION others PEOPLE readers PEOPLE mother- PERSON ship VEHICLE Two CARDINAL reports EVENT_COMMUNICATION claim EVENT_COMMUNICATION its ORGANIZATION your PERSON
mattmcknight 12y ago
One challenge with trying to expose these kinds of services via an API is that much of their utility emerges from a building a model around data of interest. In order to efficiently build a customized capability, one would have to upload potentially large amounts of data to an engine for processing. As a general information service, you ask a question in text, and get an answer in text.
ar7hur 12y ago
Most commenters here find these demos very underwhelming and I must agree with them. Well known open source NLP packages like Stanford NLP or NLTK do much better on these (very academic) tasks. I think the problem is that Watson's demos have been trained for very specific and narrow domains (like "cloud services" in the case of Resonance). What we really want to know is how easy (or difficult) it is to train Watson for our own domain. If Watson has to make assumptions on my domain, then it will be really hard to build something useful with it.
- pesenti 12y ago
  I am not super familiar with Stanford NLP or NLTK, but I don't believe they overlap with more than two or three (relationship extraction, and maybe language id and some MT) of the services here. The value we want to bring is by providing all these services together in one place and provide tools to do fast domain adaptation. Right now to do adaptation you need to sign up to become an ecosystem partner but we will expose that adaptation tooling to everybody as well in the near future.
- transpy 12y ago
  I'm by no means an expert, I'm just a linguist that's been learning python and NLTK for a little while. I would assume the demos don't show the potential of the technology. This kind of tech shines when you customize it and train it with domain-specific data, am I wrong?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jcutrell 12y ago
Looks like there's some Ruby behind the scenes. ``` Error: undefined method `each' for nil:NilClass ```
- johnward 12y ago
  On bluemix (the IBM PaaS) you can use Ruby, node.js, etc. So they probably chose Ruby as the language for the example.
- jeisen 12y ago
  More details? Which service? What were you doing with it?
  - catshirt 12y ago
    happened to me on this page: http://watson-ce-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://watson-ce-demo.mybluemix.net/ i changed Corpus to "Social Media" and hit "Submit". i refreshed the page and did the same thing and it worked.
    - jcutrell 12y ago
      Yep - that's where i got it too.
sciencerobot 12y ago
Here is a link to the docs that should get you up and running with an example application pretty quickly. http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/qaapi/index.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
serve_yay 12y ago
I don't understand what the heck IBM is up to. They have ads with a bunch of cool icons saying stuff about a smarter future world, but I don't know what to make of any of it. Like, "Wouldn't it be great if the doctor came to you before you were sick?" Um, I guess so?
- q2 12y ago
  How much time before?
- pesenti 12y ago
  The ads refer to our healthcare offering. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lGJ0h_jAp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lGJ0h_jAp8 for an actual product. The services here are the components that allow us to build such products.
- nyrulez 12y ago
  It just makes me think IBM will never get the consumer the way other companies like Apple and Google do. There is nothing immediately actionable about how I can start using this from the get go. What the hell is bluemix ? Is that an internal thing I am supposed to know about ? How can I start being productive in 5 minutes vs. trying to solve a puzzle by piecing different pieces together ? It all seems very enterprise-y and indirect - an immediate turn off in this day and age of immediate usability and short attention spans.
logicallee 12y ago
This is interesting! I copied their own text from the top of the page at http://watson-mr-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://watson-mr-demo.mybluemix.net/ and selected "Cloud Computing." Then I changed all the words that were grey until they were green. Original: The Watson Message Resonance service analyzes the popularity of a given word within a specific community. By using this ranking system it is possible to recommend more resonant words to use when crafting messages targeted at specific audiences. Changed: The Watson Message Acceptance service analyzes the popularity of a given word within a specific community. By using this ranking system it is possible to recommend more effective words to use when A/B testing messages written for specific audiences. - Which one resonates more with you? :)
- dzdt 12y ago
  Here's a version modified for "big data and analytics" :-) The Watson Buzzword Resonance service gives the usage frequency of a test word within a target community. By using this ranking system it is possible to recommend more fashionable words to use when making messages targeted at different customers.
Jonovono 12y ago
I 'made' this to analyze you HN posts: http://hn.mybluemix.net/ http://hn.mybluemix.net/
- kevinbowman 12y ago
  Oops; I typed in "patio11" and then after a reasonable delay got "502 Bad Gateway: Registered endpoint failed to handle the request.". It came up with mine quite quickly, so guess it spends some time ingesting the data? (I haven't posted very much)
- tripzilch 12y ago
  Okay, wow that's pretty impressive, actually. How did you make this exactly? The analysis (for myself) seems quite accurate, although I have to try a few different queries (for which I don't have time right now) to determine to what extent it's suffering from the "horoscope effect" (some classifications are quite general and nice to read about oneself, making it more acceptable as accurate).
  - Jonovono 12y ago
    Hey! So I just used the Watson Node sample project. It had everything ready to go :)
Tad_Ghostly 12y ago
I'm heading up a project that will add a layer of text-based help to online courses (thats the short description...). I would love to explore the Watson APIs more. Aside from diving into the samples here, do you have other suggestions for learning more?
- aameek 12y ago
  Thanks for the interest Tad. The docs/samples/demos collateral should be a good starting point. If you would like to have a deeper engagement, please consider joining the Watson ecosystem program: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.h...
beenpoor 12y ago
In the 30 second attention I was going to give, 20 seconds was spent on registering. And then 10s to figure our if there is any demo or any sort. I couldn't find anything easy to find. I give up. Website is too slow too. And everything shows classic big corp red tapism.
- azakai 12y ago
  That's odd, I see big links to live demos on each of the services, and no one asks you to register for anything? For example, click on "view a live demo" here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/language-identification.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
- pesenti 12y ago
  You don't have to register to see the docs and the demos. Every demo is 2 clicks away from the front page. Registering is free but necessary, as for every other Paas to create your own app. Tell us where is the "big corp red tape" and we'll take it out. We are trying to make the experience as streamlined as possible.
  - beenpoor 12y ago
    First off, sorry I was rude yesterday. I tried three different demos and all of them were asking for either FB login or something and got annoyed I couldn't try it. Few questions. I am interested in question and answer service. Is there any related demo ? Specifically, a pre-trained knowledge base. Even better if you can allow anyone to ingest a knowledge into your cloud, train and have it running.
    - aameek 12y ago
      Likely something else going on with your browser.. Demos have no logins whatsoever...
anigbrowl 12y ago
Interesting. I can see a market for maybe five of these 'Watson' things.
azakai 12y ago
Very impressed. I tried out the machine translation live demo, and based on a few samples I gave it, it appears to beat everything else I am aware of.
- pesenti 12y ago
  Thanks! The Watson research team has a long tradition with MT (this is the team that actually invented statistical MT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation) and always achieves top rankings in many of the public competitions. But we had never exposed MT to a broad market. So bear with us while we iron the wrinkles.
slashnull 12y ago
Can I... Can I actually date Watson? Is that in the short-term plan? Anybody knows?
- aameek 12y ago
  Yes, it is already available. You just have to close your eyes and try very very hard... Make sure you are all positive in your heart, else it fails (we are working to remove that limitation soon)
ericHosick 12y ago
I tried the Language Identification service (http://ibmlaser.mybluemix.net/liddemo.html http://ibmlaser.mybluemix.net/liddemo.html), put in Vietnamese from wikipedia and "en-US" returned. I did sign up. Note that in incognito mode, I have access to that link. I am guessing others do too.

362 points by harscoat 12y ago

For anyone that would like to leave feedback about what we can do to improve the API's feel free to leave your input here. Have at it!: https://trello.com/b/dXizfv9z/watson-developer-cloud https://trello.com/b/dXizfv9z/watson-developer-cloud

andrea_s 12y ago

For all the hype that surrounds this platform, the live demos are truly underwhelming...

skorgu 12y ago
Agreed. For kicks I dumped a bunch of dmr biographical material (Wired, NYT, his personal web page) into http://ibmlaser.mybluemix.net/siredemo.html http://ibmlaser.mybluemix.net/siredemo.html Some "PERSONS" it found, everything between '' is [sic]: 'C' 'Cobol' 'B begat C.' '”' (yes, a single fancy closing quote) 'engineer' '’ initials' '’70s' '“Jobs’ genius' Some of it is understandable given how annoying single-character identifiers are to parse and others are roughly reasonable in context. Even given some of those quirks I bet it would be useful if you had bajillions of pages (cough ediscovery cough) to search through instead of a few general-audience articles.
- shrikant 12y ago
  For anyone else who wants to know, 'dmr' in parent post is Dennis Ritchie. (I knew this, but didn't make the association right away, and it's quite hard to search online for 'dmr')
  - TillE 12y ago
    Searching for 'dmr person' does the trick with Google. Top result, and a sidebar of Dennis Ritchie.
  - pdabbadabba 12y ago
    You should've asked Watson. Then you would have learned the truth: dmr is 's wear daily.
- simias 12y ago
  Yeah it's pretty bad, even inputing a well written news article like this one: http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/oct/08/return-of-john-galliano-more-than-matter-of-style http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/oct/08/return-of-joh... ” PERSON its ORGANIZATION ’s Wear Daily PERSON shoulder pad DISEASE The rest is mostly correct (although random punctuation seems included at times) but it's nothing you couldn't get by word matching using a big dictionary. It reminded me to get tested for shoulder pads though, so there's that.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - pesenti 12y ago
    We have a bug with quotes/punctuation that we are fixing now (that account for 1 & 3). "its" is not necessarily a mistake, it likely refers to the owner. "shoulder pad" is a mistake due to the probabilistic nature of the algorithms used.
  - parsabg 12y ago
    FWIW I ran the article through AYLIEN's Text API and here's what I got: http://aylien.com/text-api-demo?text=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ffashion%2F2014%2Foct%2F08%2Freturn-of-john-galliano-more-than-matter-of-style&tab=concepts&run=1 http://aylien.com/text-api-demo?text=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thegua... (disclaimer: I'm the founder of AYLIEN)
- pesenti 12y ago
  We have found a bug with character normalization (which messes up the parsing of the punctuation). We'll fix this today.
- jonperl 12y ago
  Interesting, this service is a lot like http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/alchemylanguage http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/alchemylanguage
- pesenti 12y ago
  We fixed the bug with punctuation. Can you try again?
  - skorgu 12y ago
    Took me a while but I retried. It's definitely better, to the point that I have to stretch a bit to find really bad errors. "B begat C" still makes it in as do a few similar ones but considering how pathological a case a single-letter identifier is I can forgive that. I assume because the identifiers aren't unique that they're returned in the underlying api as text locations. Hmm now I want to throw EDGAR data at this.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I played with language recognition demo and learned that Polish is apparently German. Being born in Galicia[0], I guess I shouldn't be surprised... [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_%28Eastern_Europe%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_%28Eastern_Europe%29
- pesenti 12y ago
  Sorry Polish is not one of the supported language yet: Arabic; Chinese (Simplified); Chinese (Traditional); Cyrillic; Danish; Dutch; English; Farsi; Finnish; French; German; Greek; Hebrew; Hindi; Icelandic; Italian; Japanese; Korean; Norwegian (Bokmal); Norwegian (Nynorsk); Portuguese; Spanish; Swedish; Turkish; Urdu.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Oh right, I'm sorry. It was actually written on the demo page, but I somehow missed it.
  - johnward 12y ago
    I also imagine that distinguishing between many of these languages is not a trivial task for a computer to handle.
    - TillE 12y ago
      You'd get collisions if you're trying to determine the language of a single word, obviously. But a sentence or two should be no problem. You're just matching words in a dictionary. Different languages are mostly quite distinct. It would be a more interesting challenge to recognize and understand, say, German dialects.
      - a3_nm 12y ago
        In fact you can already get very good results, even without a dictionary, just with a distribution of the trigrams in your input languages (which is immediate to compute from a corpus). Just compute the distribution of the sample and return the language that has the closest one.

pesenti 12y ago

This is the first batch of APIs that my team - the Watson Developer Cloud team - is exposing through IBM BlueMix for everybody to try and use. We have many more APIs in the pipeline but we decided to come out quickly with a small set to start with. We are trying get some early feedback from the developer community on what they find useful, what they'd like to see, how the APIs are designed, the quality of the documentation and example code, etc. Comments and questions are very welcome!

philbarr 12y ago
I have some questions: - It says, "During the BETA period, all Watson Services will be available for free on Bluemix." So what are the prices after the beta period? I can't put the time into learning this if it's not viable after the beta. - What is Bluemix? Is it just the "place where all the services are?"
- zrail 12y ago
  Bluemix is IBM's implementation of CloudFoundry, an open-source Heroku-like platform-as-a-service. Presumably they're making this API available as an add-on to Bluemix applications.
  - pridkett 12y ago
    That's correct. These APIs are some of the many services you can attach to your applications within BlueMix.
- pesenti 12y ago
  1. Right now we are working on a revenue sharing basis with the start ups that sign up as ecosystem partners (they also have access to more capabilities). http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/ibm-sees-salvation-in-watsons-new-york-home/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/07/ibm-sees-salvation-in-watso... has a few examples of these start ups and you can sign up here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.h.... We will likely come up with a pay-per-call model that's compelling for start ups as well. 2. BlueMix is the IBM PaaS - it has a lot of powerful services beyond Watson - http://bluemix.net http://bluemix.net. It allows you to create and deploy apps in the cloud.

philbarr 12y ago

It seems that to get a true "wow" moment out of this, you would need to use the services in combination, but there is no demo of this. Each demo looks like nothing more than a database search of the training data - no super amazing algorithms supplied. Perhaps IBM could provide an example "wow" moment to inspire us?

pesenti 12y ago
The demos are really made to demonstrate some basic input/output usage. Combination apps are indeed where we think developers will find the most value. We plan to have an app gallery to show that soon. Thanks for the suggestion.
- philbarr 12y ago
  Could you describe a potential "wow" app, and how you would use the combination of services to achieve it? To get me salivating for more?
  - tucson 12y ago
    create a persona that can have a conversation with people see the movie "Her" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/ how many people will fall in love with Watson?
    - thisjepisje 12y ago
      Let's call it Emma Watson then.
      - joshmn 12y ago
        I already do, and don't think I'm alone...
  - aameek 12y ago
    To give an example ... Here is what a retail partner is building with these services around specialized marketing: They have (or get) a user's twitter handle, feed the content authored by the user into the user modeling service and based on the characteristics, send appropriate coupons/offers (e.g. very adventurous or less so etc). Combining that with the machine translation & language identification services, they are able to broaden this to many more languages vs. just English. The part that they are doing next is: with the community of their users, they want to check the potential resonance of their marketing messages to those users, which they do with the Message Resonance service. Based on that, they can pick the most likely to be resonant message before sending it to the user.

tempodox 12y ago

There seems to be a lot of context missing. I can't for the life of me come up with a simple example that demonstrates these services' value to me.

aameek 12y ago
See my response to philbarr above about a retail partner. Here is another example related to recruitment. Often we have a need to hire that we identify with another model employee (e.g. wouldnt it be great, if I had a dev like John from TeamX). With the User Modeling service, we had a Hackathon team create a beautiful app where you can ask questions like these and comparing the characteristics of candidates to John, it can find similar matches (of course done in the context of matching skills)

bolaft 12y ago

How do these services work, compsci-wise? Could someone link a few IBM publications explaining how the Question & Answer API works? That would be very helpful. The documentation pages explain nothing.

pesenti 12y ago
Good suggestions. Most of these have published papers, we'll add that to the documentation soon. In the meantime you can read an overview of the Watson Jeopardy system here: http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php http://www.aaai.org/Magazine/Watson/watson.php.
- bolaft 12y ago
  Thanks, that would be great.
pridkett 12y ago
The research group within IBM that's working on the question and answer portion of Watson is called DeepQA. You can check out lots of information about the team, including publications, at http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_subpage.php?id=2159 http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group_subpa...
- bolaft 12y ago
  Thanks for the info.
jlas 12y ago
Some of these services definitely draw from the area of Natural Language Processing [1] and Semantic Analysis [2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_analysis_(machine_learning) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_analysis_(machine_lear...
- bolaft 12y ago

juretriglav 12y ago

The language detection failed to work (it identified it as tr-TR) with these words for Slovene: jabolko hruška sliva marelica drevo dež mleko malo preveč majhno veliko This works perfectly on the first result on Google for "language identification", however: https://open.xerox.com/Services/LanguageIdentifier https://open.xerox.com/Services/LanguageIdentifier Edit: I now see Slovene is not supported, apologies are in order.

ArjenM 12y ago
Noticed it does not find Frisian, but then again neither does Google. It just gives random guesses every time.
- pesenti 12y ago
  As mentioned in other comments, this language is not yet supported. But it would be better to return "unknown" rather than guessing, so we'll look into that.

2close4comfort 12y ago

So I can feed Watson public info about someone and it can make recommendations...for travel like the example, maybe preference of beverage, or custom dictionary words/terms that would be associated with this relevant information. Like a custom dictionary customized to an individual with a little alpha/numeric replacement and some special chars thrown in...wait I have to go ask Watson a couple of questions.

thewarrior 12y ago

I tried the Relation Ship demo on the first paragraph of an HN frontpage story : https://imgur.com/7XYnttk https://imgur.com/7XYnttk It obviously has some way to go .

pesenti 12y ago
Sorry we have a bug with character normalization which messes up punctuation parsing. That accounts for most of the mistakes here ("its" is not a mistake, it refers to the owner). Here is the fixed output: Adobe ORGANIZATION Digital Editions ORGANIZATION others PEOPLE readers PEOPLE mother- PERSON ship VEHICLE Two CARDINAL reports EVENT_COMMUNICATION claim EVENT_COMMUNICATION its ORGANIZATION your PERSON

mattmcknight 12y ago

One challenge with trying to expose these kinds of services via an API is that much of their utility emerges from a building a model around data of interest. In order to efficiently build a customized capability, one would have to upload potentially large amounts of data to an engine for processing. As a general information service, you ask a question in text, and get an answer in text.

ar7hur 12y ago

Most commenters here find these demos very underwhelming and I must agree with them. Well known open source NLP packages like Stanford NLP or NLTK do much better on these (very academic) tasks. I think the problem is that Watson's demos have been trained for very specific and narrow domains (like "cloud services" in the case of Resonance). What we really want to know is how easy (or difficult) it is to train Watson for our own domain. If Watson has to make assumptions on my domain, then it will be really hard to build something useful with it.

pesenti 12y ago
I am not super familiar with Stanford NLP or NLTK, but I don't believe they overlap with more than two or three (relationship extraction, and maybe language id and some MT) of the services here. The value we want to bring is by providing all these services together in one place and provide tools to do fast domain adaptation. Right now to do adaptation you need to sign up to become an ecosystem partner but we will expose that adaptation tooling to everybody as well in the near future.
transpy 12y ago
I'm by no means an expert, I'm just a linguist that's been learning python and NLTK for a little while. I would assume the demos don't show the potential of the technology. This kind of tech shines when you customize it and train it with domain-specific data, am I wrong?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jcutrell 12y ago

Looks like there's some Ruby behind the scenes. ``` Error: undefined method `each' for nil:NilClass ```

johnward 12y ago
On bluemix (the IBM PaaS) you can use Ruby, node.js, etc. So they probably chose Ruby as the language for the example.
jeisen 12y ago
More details? Which service? What were you doing with it?
- catshirt 12y ago
  happened to me on this page: http://watson-ce-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://watson-ce-demo.mybluemix.net/ i changed Corpus to "Social Media" and hit "Submit". i refreshed the page and did the same thing and it worked.
  - jcutrell 12y ago
    Yep - that's where i got it too.

sciencerobot 12y ago

Here is a link to the docs that should get you up and running with an example application pretty quickly. http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/qaapi/index.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...

serve_yay 12y ago

I don't understand what the heck IBM is up to. They have ads with a bunch of cool icons saying stuff about a smarter future world, but I don't know what to make of any of it. Like, "Wouldn't it be great if the doctor came to you before you were sick?" Um, I guess so?

q2 12y ago
How much time before?
pesenti 12y ago
The ads refer to our healthcare offering. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lGJ0h_jAp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lGJ0h_jAp8 for an actual product. The services here are the components that allow us to build such products.
nyrulez 12y ago
It just makes me think IBM will never get the consumer the way other companies like Apple and Google do. There is nothing immediately actionable about how I can start using this from the get go. What the hell is bluemix ? Is that an internal thing I am supposed to know about ? How can I start being productive in 5 minutes vs. trying to solve a puzzle by piecing different pieces together ? It all seems very enterprise-y and indirect - an immediate turn off in this day and age of immediate usability and short attention spans.

logicallee 12y ago

This is interesting! I copied their own text from the top of the page at http://watson-mr-demo.mybluemix.net/ http://watson-mr-demo.mybluemix.net/ and selected "Cloud Computing." Then I changed all the words that were grey until they were green. Original: The Watson Message Resonance service analyzes the popularity of a given word within a specific community. By using this ranking system it is possible to recommend more resonant words to use when crafting messages targeted at specific audiences. Changed: The Watson Message Acceptance service analyzes the popularity of a given word within a specific community. By using this ranking system it is possible to recommend more effective words to use when A/B testing messages written for specific audiences. - Which one resonates more with you? :)

dzdt 12y ago
Here's a version modified for "big data and analytics" :-) The Watson Buzzword Resonance service gives the usage frequency of a test word within a target community. By using this ranking system it is possible to recommend more fashionable words to use when making messages targeted at different customers.

Jonovono 12y ago

I 'made' this to analyze you HN posts: http://hn.mybluemix.net/ http://hn.mybluemix.net/

kevinbowman 12y ago
Oops; I typed in "patio11" and then after a reasonable delay got "502 Bad Gateway: Registered endpoint failed to handle the request.". It came up with mine quite quickly, so guess it spends some time ingesting the data? (I haven't posted very much)
tripzilch 12y ago
Okay, wow that's pretty impressive, actually. How did you make this exactly? The analysis (for myself) seems quite accurate, although I have to try a few different queries (for which I don't have time right now) to determine to what extent it's suffering from the "horoscope effect" (some classifications are quite general and nice to read about oneself, making it more acceptable as accurate).
- Jonovono 12y ago
  Hey! So I just used the Watson Node sample project. It had everything ready to go :)

Tad_Ghostly 12y ago

I'm heading up a project that will add a layer of text-based help to online courses (thats the short description...). I would love to explore the Watson APIs more. Aside from diving into the samples here, do you have other suggestions for learning more?

aameek 12y ago
Thanks for the interest Tad. The docs/samples/demos collateral should be a good starting point. If you would like to have a deeper engagement, please consider joining the Watson ecosystem program: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/ecosystem.h...

beenpoor 12y ago

In the 30 second attention I was going to give, 20 seconds was spent on registering. And then 10s to figure our if there is any demo or any sort. I couldn't find anything easy to find. I give up. Website is too slow too. And everything shows classic big corp red tapism.

azakai 12y ago
That's odd, I see big links to live demos on each of the services, and no one asks you to register for anything? For example, click on "view a live demo" here: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/language-identification.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
pesenti 12y ago
You don't have to register to see the docs and the demos. Every demo is 2 clicks away from the front page. Registering is free but necessary, as for every other Paas to create your own app. Tell us where is the "big corp red tape" and we'll take it out. We are trying to make the experience as streamlined as possible.
- beenpoor 12y ago
  First off, sorry I was rude yesterday. I tried three different demos and all of them were asking for either FB login or something and got annoyed I couldn't try it. Few questions. I am interested in question and answer service. Is there any related demo ? Specifically, a pre-trained knowledge base. Even better if you can allow anyone to ingest a knowledge into your cloud, train and have it running.
  - aameek 12y ago
    Likely something else going on with your browser.. Demos have no logins whatsoever...

anigbrowl 12y ago

Interesting. I can see a market for maybe five of these 'Watson' things.

azakai 12y ago

Very impressed. I tried out the machine translation live demo, and based on a few samples I gave it, it appears to beat everything else I am aware of.

pesenti 12y ago
Thanks! The Watson research team has a long tradition with MT (this is the team that actually invented statistical MT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_machine_translation) and always achieves top rankings in many of the public competitions. But we had never exposed MT to a broad market. So bear with us while we iron the wrinkles.

slashnull 12y ago

Can I... Can I actually date Watson? Is that in the short-term plan? Anybody knows?

aameek 12y ago
Yes, it is already available. You just have to close your eyes and try very very hard... Make sure you are all positive in your heart, else it fails (we are working to remove that limitation soon)

ericHosick 12y ago

I tried the Language Identification service (http://ibmlaser.mybluemix.net/liddemo.html http://ibmlaser.mybluemix.net/liddemo.html), put in Vietnamese from wikipedia and "en-US" returned. I did sign up. Note that in incognito mode, I have access to that link. I am guessing others do too.