New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more

https://developer.ibm.com/watson/blog/2015/02/04/new-watson-services-available/

by jsstylos • 11 years ago

203 103 11 years ago

developer.ibm.com

pesenti6• 11 years ago

Some context on the new services. They are built on technology that comes from IBM Research and has been moved into the Watson group in 2014. Some like speech, have been developed for more than 50 years. None of these technologies have overlap with the Watson Jeopardy stack (except for the Watson voice). We will release that stack later this year as a series of services allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog application.

All the Watson services are still in beta but will start going GA very soon (first one next month). If you have any questions, please fire up, the Watson team is ready to answer.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m• 11 years ago

Text-to-speech is very impressive. Thanks!

ubercore• 11 years ago

Are you working on any audio (non-speech) analysis services? I have no particular usecase in mind, but it's an area I'm always interested in!

picheny12• 11 years ago

We have worked on audio analytics in the past for things such as outdoor sound detection and vehicle identification. We are currently focusing on speech-based analytics such as language ID and affect recognition. The statistical methodologies we are using for speech are easily extended to such domains. We hope that by puuting out these initial speech services we will get feedback from the community about related problems and welcome your suggestions.

JimBlizz• 11 years ago

You might want to check out Echonest's API - http://developer.echonest.com/

pgeorgi• 11 years ago

allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog application.
If you have any questions, please fire up, the Watson team is ready to answer.

So that's what you built Watson for :-)

pesenti6• 11 years ago

We'd love to do an automated AMA. We are not yet there but if the community provided some training data I believe it's within reach. Give us a couple of years!

jcfrei• 11 years ago

Do any of the Watson services allow for feedback to train them?

keelyw• 11 years ago

Yes, all services include a feedback API, and the demos also include a mechanism for providing feedback. As an example, see 4th paragraph in this doc, which also includes a link to the API docs: http://ibm.co/1yNfztF And here's a link to the demo, see the "Give us feedback" link: http://bit.ly/1EJllDF

picheny12• 11 years ago

We want feedback on all our services. If you are speaking about using data to update the service, I know the speech services do not yet have this capability.

frik• 11 years ago

Do you plan to open source some of your stuff (voice recognition, speech synthesis, gazetteers, UIMA related code)?

Watson Jeopardy itself is built on top of Apache open source stack (Apache UIMA and Hadoop): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIMA

picheny12• 11 years ago

honestly we have not gotten that far yet - at least on the speech technology side. Good discussion to have.

kastnerkyle2• 11 years ago

What techniques are being used for text to speech? Is is something deep learning related or more standard HMM synthesis? Any paper references?

cypher5432• 11 years ago

According to the documentation[1], it's a concatenative synthesizer using decision trees for prosody modeling and PSOLA for output.

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

Caligula3• 11 years ago

I find it terribly confusing. It does not explain what instances are, do I need an instance to access some of the services?

I just want to access some services via API from my own servers. I think the documentation is not that good, there should be curl examples at least. For instance, for the STT or TTS include some curl examples.

Does the STT have speaker identification or does it output text in one stream?

I tried to access: https://gateway-s.watsonplatform.net:8443/speech-to-text-bet...

I used my bluemix l/p. It did not work. Are there other api credentials that are needed?

jsstylos4• 11 years ago

Yes, the API credentials for the service are different from the Bluemix login. To get the API credentials, you have to create a service through Bluemix, bind it to a Bluemix application and get the credentials from the VCAP_SERVICES of that Bluemix app. There's a getting started page describing these steps at http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl... (We hope to make this process simpler in the future!)

devniel• 11 years ago

Great, I'm waiting for it, actually I can't do so much with the preloaded domain on Q&A service.

bkeroack• 11 years ago

Pricing page (which they don't make easy to find): https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing

When this was first announced I remember reading about their pricing model where they would take a percentage of app revenue. I'm glad to see they offer flat pay-as-you-go pricing now. Some of the Watson services are intriguing.

ConfuciusSay• 11 years ago

Now you can buy back stock algorithmically in the cloud!

SlipperySlope• 11 years ago

Compare the Watson text-to-speech voices with Nuance ...

Watson http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/

Nuance http://www.nuance.com/for-business/text-to-speech/vocalizer/...

I prefer the Watson version voicing a sample paragraph. Both are good enough for an application that selects on price. For a voice-first application, maybe Watson is better for TTS.

For speech to text, Nuance has been the leader, e.g. Apple's Siri. Has anyone compared IBM speech recognition to Nuance, Microsoft & Google?

jp80002• 11 years ago

I believe that the Nuance technology is built on IBM Speech research: http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-solution/customer-serv...

AustinG082• 11 years ago

My evidence is anecdotal at best, but I have found Siri to be terrible and my "OK, Google" to be wonderful.

picheny12• 11 years ago

As a speech technologist, I am amazed and proud about how far long the technology has progressed, especially over the last few years. Even my wife now uses speech input on mobile devices (and may finally think I may be doing something productive...). With that said, speech input is still a surprisingly finicky technology and different people will see different beahviors across systems from different providers.

ghshephard• 11 years ago

Siri was completely unusable/unresponsive from 2011/2012, but then, somewhere around 2012/2013, started to become pretty good (most of the time) for things like, "Wake me up at 6:30 AM" - I used it for that type of query a lot. Dictation, though, was spotty - I would say about 10-20% of the time, I just got a spinning non-response, and even when it did work, it would be slow, and the results would be iffy. And, once again, I used the dictation a lot.

But - sometime in 2014, and I can't really place it - but right around June/August, Siri all of a sudden turned a corner, and her dictation ability got markedly better - so much now, that I don't even bother typing into my iPhone if I'm in a place where I can talk to it - dictation is 99% flawless. much better than my typing, and unquestionably faster.

For whatever reason, Apple hasn't been making a big deal of this - perhaps because they don't want to admit how crappy it was before - but it really is a big deal. Siri is, 3 years later, what she should have been in 20111.

Can't wait to see what the next step in this evolution will be...

picheny12• 11 years ago

We know we have strong core speech technology based on various comparisons we have done in the context of competitive evaluations done in conjunction with various government funded speech programs. However, our service is still very new. We could have waited for months to tune it, but our primary goal here is to solicit feedback from the community for how to make our services easier to use, especially in the context of our other platform services. We don't want to wait till the design is so mature that it is impossible to change - so any and all feedback is very welcome!

taf23• 11 years ago

yes but how do you sign up for either service?

braindead_in• 11 years ago

I run an human powered audio transcription service and I'd be very interested in trying it out. I went through the API docs and it seems straightforward enough. However, what's the pricing? Can't find it anywhere. Is it free?

cypher5432• 11 years ago

The Watson voice is great, but I think CereProc voices sound the most natural. Also, I like that you can use them offline.

yourapostasy• 11 years ago

For TTS, compare further with Vocalware and CereProc

Vocalware https://www.vocalware.com/index/demo CereProc https://www.cereproc.com/

It is getting increasingly difficult to pick one as the clear leader for "natural sounding". The results are good enough for voicing canned text, and certainly better enunciated than many thick-accented English speakers. Improvements through training can still be made in parsing the text.

For example, IBM Watson interprets "IT" as "it", in the following sentence.

Thank you for calling the IT department.

Vocalware and CereProc correctly parse that.

Who I would really like to hear opinions from are professional voice actors, though they would tend to be understandably leery to lend a hand to improve TTS. Is there a standardized form of writing text that communicates the kind of emphasis, placement of silence and warping of phonemes these actors use in their delivery to concisely convey emotion, that TTS products can adopt?

picheny12• 11 years ago

SSML is a speech synthesis markup language that has some degree of popularity in the field. The specific section on markup for emphasis is http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis11/#S3.2

bhuga• 11 years ago

The text-to-speech is actually a little nicer than Siri or Cortana, but not groundbreaking. This was the only one of the 5 that I thought did well. The rest might have been better without demo pages.

For visual recognition, I used a picture of a snowmobile from http://www.1888goodwin.com/2013/11/14/what-do-you-need-to-do..., which it identified with 73% confidence as "Invertebrate".

Speech to text is a parody twitter account waiting to happen. Here's me asking it how it does with technical transcription:

How do you doing technical words.

If you were going to have to talk about get an jute cushion pull.

And you wanted to discuss the impact on a file server memory.

Issues that cross processes talk about home forks rivers slowed difficult.

jp80002• 11 years ago

Make sure you use a headset, not your laptop's microphone.

iandanforth• 11 years ago

That's not a reasonable requirement. It only sounds like one to you because the technology has been so bad for so long.

cma• 11 years ago

Maybe it overtrained on post-accident snowmobile riders.

humanfromearth• 11 years ago

I tried using Watson a month ago without much success. I wanted to do a classification of some random text, and say that this text for example is this category. But as far as I could understand it only allows using their own datasets.

It's not possible to train their service with your data, unlike wit.ai for example. Seems obvious to me that people would want to train with their own data.

pesenti6• 11 years ago

Pretty much all the services that we are releasing will have some adaptation capabilities - allowing you to provide your own data, create your own models, etc - at some point. Stay posted.

cabirum• 11 years ago

Visual recognition has some room for improvement

http://i.imgur.com/V59IeQH.png

aroopPandya2• 11 years ago

hey, try changing the classifier from "All" to "Scene". It does much better.. and stay tuned we will release some more api's on top of visual recognition to allow for image labeling..

niels_olson• 11 years ago

In other news, Watson will be RA'd at the end of the month.

johnward2• 11 years ago

If anyone is not going to be RA'd it's Watson group. There is a lot riding on the success of Watson.

CrazyCatDog• 11 years ago

Agreed, it's hard to find any other marketable IP in IBM's portfolio.

panzagl• 11 years ago

Yeah, unfortunately the Watson's group problem is going to be keeping the life raft from being being swamped by everyone else on the ship. If we see 'Rational Watson Powered by WebSphere' we'll know they didn't swing the oars hard enough...

taf23• 11 years ago

if only they had a credit card signup page... you know to let people pay for it...

Poiesis2• 11 years ago

Two things that jumped out at me:

1. No "special characters" allowed in passwords when creating an account. 2. ...where's the REST API? I've "added a service" (TTS), but I have to write a webapp to expose it over HTTP? It sure is a different experience than your typical API documentation.

aroopPandya2• 11 years ago

take a look @ https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc.... There is also doc link once you click on the service you have bounded. There are samples in java and nodejs. (samples coming soon in github)

Poiesis2• 11 years ago

I did indeed take a look at the docs. That's why I commented. If there's documentation of REST end points, it's not obvious to me. Maybe someone else will point out what I'm missing.

As far as I can tell, most of the documentation essentially begins, "First, deploy a web app on our platform". Which is fine I guess, but isn't nearly as simple as the HTTP APIs you see from many other recent SaaS providers. As least for me, I'm pretty unlikely to jump through those hoops. Maybe others will be different.

Edit: All the way down on the bottom of the documentation page, past the research references, there's a link to HTTP API documentation--literally the last link on the page.

jsstylos4• 11 years ago

1. This is good feedback, thanks. 2. The rest API docs are at https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc... You can call the service directly, though the samples show using an http webapp as a proxy to avoid exposing private service credentials. We're still working on the documentation, so feedback is helpful here. What other service REST API docs do you like, just out of curiosity? What are the features that makes that documentation useful?

jsstylos4• 11 years ago

I'm on the Watson team and we're interested in learning from developers to make our APIs and documentation easier to use. Have feedback? We'd love to hear it. jsstylos@us.ibm.com Twitter: @jsstylos

corin_• 11 years ago

@IBM people: Is there any information available yet either regarding future pricing, or regarding timeline for getting pricing information?

johnward2• 11 years ago

Someone else posted this but here is the bluemix pricing page: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing

_delirium• 11 years ago

That gives the pricing for running compute instances on BlueMix, but at the moment there's no pricing for these Watson services, since they're free-while-in-beta. Presumably post-beta there will be some kind of charge per N queries, like the other out-of-beta services (e.g. the Business Rules service charges $1.00 per 1000 API calls), but there's not currently an indication of when that's likely to happen and/or the likely price range.

qeorge3• 11 years ago

I've been uploading the easiest photos I can find to the visual recognition demo[1], and its yet to get one right.

For example, I searched Google for "photo of girl", and found this image which seems very easy:

http://www.wagggsworld.org/shared/uploads/img/rachel-s-p-pho...

Watson says:

    Color		71%
    Human		67%
    Photo		65%
    Dog			59%
    Person		57%
    Placental_Mammal	56%
    Animal		50%
    Long_Jump		50%

Huh?

This isn't me cherry picking bad results; aside from their demos I'm not finding any photos that are accurately classified. I even tried a headshot of a person isolated on a white background, and Watson told me I uploaded a photo of "shoes".

Seriously - how is this data useful? What could I build with this level of accuracy?

Watson team - do you agree? Is this product about to get a lot better, soon, or is this considered "pretty good"?

[1] http://visual-recognition-demo.mybluemix.net/

pesenti6• 11 years ago

The top 3 classes in your example are actually correct - it is a color photo of a human. But we expect it to get much better over time. Only real world usage will allow us to make real improvement - and that's why we are eager to release early.

We are also believe that the first applications (e.g., classifying animals or plants or landmarks in dedicated apps) will have narrower use case that give better accuracy.

qeorge3• 11 years ago

The top 3 may be correct, but they aren't very useful. What could I do with this information? What feature could I build?

Also, the other results are very wrong. (i.e., Watson is more confident that this is a dog than a person. And I have no idea where it got "Long Jump" from). This makes it hard for me to trust Watson.

Is the recommendation that I incorporate a "confidence in Watson" metric, and ignore most of the results?

What confidence from Watson would you say indicates an answer that is probably accurate? And how confident are you that Watson's self-reported confidence is accurate?

anonymfus• 11 years ago

Why confidence that it is a human is higher than confidence that it is a placental mammal, and confidence that it is a placental mammal is higher than confidence that it is an animal? More specific descriptions must have less confidence.

Or Watson is not confident that humans are placental mammals and placental mammals are animals?

bane• 11 years ago

The problem with AI systems has almost always been that they tend to be both right and wrong in ways that humans would never be.

Watson gives high confidence to it being a color photo of a human (which is a Person, and an Animal). Which is right. But the only part that a human would ever really care about is that there's another human in the picture.

It gets things wrong with a reasonable confidence for Dog, Placental_Mammal and Long_Jump...importantly, these are wrong in ways that humans would never get wrong.

Just as important are the omissions. A human would probably describe this as a picture of a girl or young woman, laughing or smiling, with curly brown hair wearing a scarf -- and maybe some other incidental information.

Of that description, Watson only got the superclass of one part correct (Human, Person) and didn't provide any of the other parts.

AI fundamentally "thinks" differently than a human, and that makes it hard for humans to use AI as a cognitive enhancement tool in the same way humans use calculators, books, writing, etc. We don't trust what an AI is doing or the answers it provides because for the information it provides, AIs tend to provide right-and-irrelevant, weirdly wrong, or omits obvious and necessary information that a human might use for informational purposes.

If humans ever encounter aliens, it's likely that their mode of thinking will be just as different. So bridging that gap, and figuring out how to make AI like this useful could be a useful endeavor.

picheny12• 11 years ago

One thing a machine learning system can do that any one human cannot do is ingest lots of data. For example, for some tasks in which I have tried to compare human vs machine speech recognition performance the machine actually does better because the machine may - for example - know a singer's name that an individual human may not recognize.

m_ke• 11 years ago

Compare that to clarifai: http://i.imgur.com/BsWdpUA.jpg

portrait

youth

fashion

facial expression

women

european

girl

model

female

actress

Patrick_Devine• 11 years ago

I gave it a picture of a cat (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Turkish_V...) and got:

Photo 75% Shoes 69% Nature_Scene 69% Meat_Eater 63% Object 63% Mammal 63% Vertebrate 63% Cat 63% Indoors 62% Room 60% Person 58% Color 57% Judo 54% Person_View 53% Human 51% Leisure_Activity 50%

If you give the classifier a hint (animal) it gives: Meat_Eater 63% Mammal 63% Vertebrate 63% Cat 63%

So, clearly needs work as a general classifier, but still potentially useful.

taf23• 11 years ago

How do I signup and pay them money?

tparikh• 11 years ago

Watson services on Bluemix are currently in beta. You can use the beta services at no charge, even after your 30 day Bluemix trial, although you will need to provide a credit card to Bluemix. You will not incur any charges unless you use any of the production services.

harisamin• 11 years ago

This is great! There was a startup JetPacCity (acquired by Google) that was doing some CNN for image recognition, mostly on the mobile client side. They had open sourced their lib: https://github.com/jetpacapp/DeepBeliefSDK

karmacondon• 11 years ago

So the gist of what I'm seeing in this thread is, "Watson's API services aren't very good yet, but they will get better as it collects and processes more data".

So basically, IBM is charging us to provide it with training data to make Watson useful for practical applications. Makes sense, but I can't help but feel that it would be a smarter move to skip charging entirely for now, or to use drastically reduced pricing tiers that exist only for the purpose of preventing abuse. The idea of releasing a product like this with less than impressive demos is a bit of a risk. It's not going to encourage people to use it if the demos aren't compelling, and the demos won't be compelling until a lot of people are using it. I'd err on the side of optimism here, it'll probably work out for the best, but it will be interesting to see how this goes and provide a good case study.

My other thought is that if IBM can't get sufficient training data on their own, what hope do the rest of us have? Performing classification on arbitrary data is a herculean task. People could throw literally anything at this api and will expect to get common sense results, it's nearly impossible and pushing the boundaries of what even cutting edge software can do. But if a company like IBM spends billions of dollars and their demos still end up generating mostly confusion and complaints... This kind of open ended "AI" might be more difficult than even the most conservative experts thought.

EDIT: As an after thought, the real value here isn't so much software as it is pooled training data. Facebook has been able to identify human faces in photos for years, speech-to-text and concept modelling have all been around for a long time. What's difficult is getting the labelled data necessary to distinguish between "is this a picture of a person or a picture of a cat?". Watson is great and it seems like IBM has made an investment in acquiring and collecting the data necessary to do that. But their big play here might be to build a consumer friendly enough product that their users contribute the rest of that data for them over the next several years, building an aggregate data set that is worth as much or more than the software itself. Again, will be interesting to see how it plays out.

jsstylos4• 11 years ago

All of the Watson services are free in beta. (Bluemix, through which the services are accessed, requires a credit card after 30 days, but doesn't charge you for use of the beta Watson services.)

We wanted to get the services into peoples hands early, even though we're still working on them, rather than wait until we had a perfect product. There's a tradeoff here, but we figure that we can improve the services faster and better with public usage and feedback than we could in private isolation.

Since they're free, hopefully people will be able to have some fun playing around with the services, also!

taliesinb• 11 years ago

What's difficult is getting the labelled data necessary to distinguish between "is this a picture of a person or a picture of a cat?". Watson is great and it seems like IBM has made an investment in acquiring and collecting the data necessary to do that.

Are they using more than ImageNet? The ImageNet dataset(s) are not hard to get.

flamedoge• 11 years ago

Real value is heuristics. or learning algorithms to refine heuristics. Data is always growing.

walterbell• 11 years ago

Should the training data set be open-source?

z3phyr• 11 years ago

This

>Speech to Text : This application only works in recent versions of Chrome supporting HTML5 audio capture

picheny12• 11 years ago

Yeah, Chrome currently seems to have the best support for audio capture.....

X-combinator• 11 years ago

The future is HERE!

FrankenPC• 11 years ago

Text to speech is pretty good. http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/?cm_mmc=developerWo...

I decided to test it a little. I copied phonem challenges and non-sensical phrasing from the web. Then I added some stuff that I know has problems from past experience.

----- Let's explore some complicated conversions, shall we? The old corn cost the blood. The wrong shot led the farm. The short arm sent the cow. How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend? Don't desert me here in the desert!. They were too close to the door to close it. The buck does funny things when does are present. Today is 1/1/2015. Today is Jan 5th, 1992. It's currently half past 12. Or 12:30PM. Twenty thousand dollars. 20,000 dollars. 20 thousand dollars. 2^5 = 32. NASA is an acronym. This ... is a pause. EmailAddress@somedomain.com.

davegolland• 11 years ago

Interesting! We over at Prismatic released our interest tagging API just yesterday ( http://blog.getprismatic.com/interest-graph-api/ ). Seems like there's a lot of opening up APIs going around.

enricobruschini• 11 years ago

I've been developing a product with Watson from within the Partner Ecosystem, some of those capabilities are pretty useful. Others, sometimes, are kind of confusing, creating a broad overpopulated constellation of Watson-based APIs inside Bluemix.

anonbanker• 11 years ago

Can we all just drop the charade and start calling Watson SkyNet already?

Kronopath• 11 years ago

The text-to-speech is surprisingly good, but I'm amazed at one thing, and not in a good way: the Spanish voice can't pronounce the word "Español". It pronounces it as "Espanol" with a hard "n" sound. In fact, it seems to pronounce all "ñ"s as "n"s. How that kind of an oversight got into the system, I'll never know. Did no one think to check?

Edit: And to add insult to injury, the English voices do pronounce "Español" correctly!

vaibhava722• 11 years ago

Fixed.

jcoffland• 11 years ago

Don't pay a company to do what can be done with a library.

New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more

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