Watson Services

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/services-catalog.html

by harscoat • 12 years ago

362 104 12 years ago

andrea_s• 12 years ago

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

skorgu2• 12 years 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

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• 12 years 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')

simias• 12 years 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-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.

pesenti17• 12 years ago

We have found a bug with character normalization (which messes up the parsing of the punctuation). We'll fix this today.

jonperl• 12 years ago

Interesting, this service is a lot like http://www.alchemyapi.com/products/demo/alchemylanguage

pesenti17• 12 years ago

We fixed the bug with punctuation. Can you try again?

TeMPOraL2• 12 years 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

pesenti17• 12 years 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.

parsabg3• 12 years ago

Do you mind sharing your input text? Interested to see how our API performs (http://aylien.com/text-api-demo)

pesenti17• 12 years 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!

philbarr4• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

pesenti17• 12 years 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-watso... has a few examples of these start ups and you can sign up here: 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. It allows you to create and deploy apps in the cloud.

mattmanser• 12 years ago

It's great that you've released the functionality. And you asked, so I hope I don't come across too harsh. I'm looking at your examples, here for example:

http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...

To make a simple call with the Java example, you've managed to write 372 lines of code.

Three hundred and seventy two lines.

That's some bad code.

There's nothing I can point at and go, that, that's what's wrong, the whole thing just has a lot of code smells. The 'zZz's (what is that DIY escaping all about?). The multiple http calls that should have been abstracted into one function, but aren't. The over commenting. The api structure requiring you to do 3+ calls. The exponential call back time (this is not a good idea, have fun with weird bugs). That you've made your own json objects. That you've used PUT for a pretty tenuous reason. That you've put all the urls in some config file or something, so the code isn't particularly clear at what it's doing.

The ruby & javascript are more terse because those languages are, but they aren't that much better. It's often silly little things, like this:

    '/status?' + querystring.stringify({'jobid':jobid});

Could have been written simply as this:

    '/status?jobid=' + jobid;

There really is no good reason to use 'querystring.stringify' in that instance, it's not user input. The code's simply over-complicated.

The code reads like a sysadmin/amateur/uni professor's code, a scripter rather than a professional programmer's. It's like you don't have a senior dev on the team to cast an eye over it and get rid of the excesses.

The APIs themselves are not bad, as I mentioned there's the slightly tenuous PUT stuff, the only other annoyance I could see is that you'd have to ping it all the time to see if it's ready. I appreciate why, and you've made the right call in the callback vs ping, simply because so often when hacking setting up a callback would be hell.

It's better than a lot, like google or paypal, so it's not all bad.

NB: But now I just found this exploring github:

https://github.com/Watson-Explorer/wex-wdc-integration-sampl...

Which at first glance is better code than the examples on the site? Bit odd.

jsstylos2• 12 years ago

For the jobid example, the stringify is necessary because the jobid returned by the server includes a # symbol. Try the code you suggested and you get the result: "Error: ContextExpansion Error: jobid is in incorrect format."

wvonhagen• 12 years ago

Since the sample Watson code is downloadable and intended to show how to use these services, I find it odd that you cite "over commenting" as a problem. Comments are a great thing in sample code, especially in code that you can download separately, without docs.

sk5t• 12 years ago

This rampant clumsiness is fairly typical for IBM code samples--doing things manually that should use a popular library, or choosing obscure or IBM-invented libraries for common things. For example, the Java example should really use Jetty or CXF for JAX-RS rather than mucking about with HTTP client calls directly...

phodo• 12 years ago

Looks great! One question: Any plan for additional client libraries / demos beyond java, nodejs, ruby/rails? e.g. - django (python) - flask (python) - obj-c - scala - go

* Plug for python - lots of ml / nlp / scientific computing done with using python.

pesenti17• 12 years ago

Yes you can use Python with these services and BlueMix. See a tutorial here: http://thoughtsoncloud.com/2014/08/getting-started-python-ib...

transpy2• 12 years ago

What you guys do is awesome. I'm interested in machine translation. I know python and NLTK. I have a grasp of statistics, I'm learning everyday more. Will I be able to design a domain-specific machine translation system with Watson?

pesenti17• 12 years ago

Yes but it's not yet available. The current service only provides a fixed domain but we will extend the API and provide tools to allow you to specify a custom domain. Offering the ability to domain adapt all these services will be a key differentiator of the Watson services. Stay posted!

philbarr4• 12 years 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?

pesenti17• 12 years 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.

philbarr4• 12 years 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?

djulius• 12 years ago

Watson itself was the "wow" moment.

throwawayornot• 12 years ago

more like the "wow great PR" moment

tempodox• 12 years 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.

aameek5• 12 years 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)

bolaft4• 12 years 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.

pesenti17• 12 years 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.

bolaft4• 12 years ago

Thanks, that would be great.

pridkett4• 12 years 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_subpa...

bolaft4• 12 years ago

Thanks for the info.

jlas• 12 years 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

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_analysis_(machine_lear...

bolaft4• 12 years ago

Thanks, however I was already aware of that, I was looking for something more specific.

juretriglav• 12 years 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

Edit: I now see Slovene is not supported, apologies are in order.

ArjenM• 12 years ago

Noticed it does not find Frisian, but then again neither does Google. It just gives random guesses every time.

pesenti17• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

I tried the Relation Ship demo on the first paragraph of an HN frontpage story :

https://imgur.com/7XYnttk

It obviously has some way to go .

pesenti17• 12 years 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• 12 years 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• 12 years 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.

pesenti17• 12 years 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.

transpy2• 12 years 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?

jcutrell2• 12 years ago

Looks like there's some Ruby behind the scenes.

``` Error: undefined method `each' for nil:NilClass ```

johnward2• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

More details? Which service? What were you doing with it?

catshirt• 12 years ago

happened to me on this page: 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.

sciencerobot• 12 years 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/developercl...

serve_yay• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

How much time before?

pesenti17• 12 years ago

The ads refer to our healthcare offering. See 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• 12 years 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• 12 years ago

This is interesting!

I copied their own text from the top of the page at 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• 12 years 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.

Jonovono2• 12 years ago

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

kevinbowman• 12 years 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)

tripzilch2• 12 years 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).

Jonovono2• 12 years ago

Hey! So I just used the Watson Node sample project. It had everything ready to go :)

Tad_Ghostly• 12 years 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?

aameek5• 12 years 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.h...

beenpoor2• 12 years 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.

azakai2• 12 years 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/developercl...

pesenti17• 12 years 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.

beenpoor2• 12 years 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.

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

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

azakai2• 12 years 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.

pesenti17• 12 years 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) 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.

ericHosick• 12 years ago

I tried the Language Identification service (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.

slashnull• 12 years ago

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

aameek5• 12 years 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)

ashhath• 12 years 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

Watson Services

Related Stories