IBM Watson Improves Its Cognitive Ability And Offers New Opportunities For Developers



    IBM is constantly adding new features and capabilities to its Watson cognitive system. This time, the system was taught to study and analyze certain photos and images on the Web, located in different places, including social resources. This will help Watson find out what a particular user is doing, what are his interests and hobbies. Such a function is one of many dozens that are available to users of the system. Now there are already more than 100 commercial applications that harness the power of Watson, and this is far from the limit - today more and more developers are working with IBM Watson.

    The goal is to create applications and services for medicine (for example, personalized cancer treatment), marketing departments of companies, meteorologists, nuclear physicists and other branches of science and business. Working with IBM Watson is possible thanks to the system API, with access to the latter through the IBM Bluemix cloud platform. As for the study and analysis of images, this service is called Visual Insights. You can work with it not only with photos, but also with videos that are uploaded to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

    Visual Insights allows you to study patterns of user behavior and trends in the publication of certain images.



    After that, Watson turns the primary data set, Big Data, into structured information that can already be used in future work.



    In addition to the ability to recognize video and photos, the developers of the service improved the API for Text to Speech and Speech to Text, which will allow creating Siri- or Cortana-like applications for smartphones. In principle, this can be used for any voice interface, including third-party robots. By the way, not so long ago, Watson studied Japanese, and now teaches Arabic with the help of specialists from Abu Dhabi. Portuguese, Spanish and English are also in the system dictionary.

    A bit earlier, IBM announced the IBM Watson Tone Analyzer., a service that helps determine the emotional tone of a text message. The service uses the principle of linguistic analysis, similar to the principle of IBM Watson Personality Insights. Tone Analyzer analyzes the text provided and evaluates the emotional and social content reflected in the text. All this can be used to evaluate personal correspondence, as well as for marketing research, public relations and an automated communication center.



    Another new service is introduced - Dialogu, which allows the user to conduct a conversation with the application. For example, if necessary, you can ask to reset the password.

    In order not to get confused among the entire variety of services from Watson, as well as give developers a tool for combining various services of the cognitive system, IBM has created a new set of tools - Watson Knowledge Studio .

    By the way, in many cases, the goal of Watson is not to replace a person, but to improve the decision-making process due to the availability of additional information in various fields. This can be an analysis of the situation with the impact of a hurricane on an industry of a certain locality or determination of the possibilities of optimizing the production process of a company. The system considers millions of factors, reveals the connections between them and offers certain solutions, while repeatedly testing them (using the appropriate models) and evaluating success in percent.

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