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

developer.ibm.com

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

#21

Post by cma »

bhuga wrote: post #8

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 twitte…

Maybe it overtrained on post-accident snowmobile riders.

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

#22

Post by Poiesis »

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.

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

#23

Post by pgeorgi »

pesenti wrote: post #2

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 applica…

> 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 :-)

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

#25

Post by picheny »

SlipperySlope wrote: post #7

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…

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!

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

#26

Post by CrazyCatDog »

johnward wrote: post #17
niels_olson wrote: post #13

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

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

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

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

#27

Post by pesenti »

pgeorgi wrote: post #23
pesenti wrote: post #2

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 applica…

> 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 :-)

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!

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

#28

Post by picheny »

AustinG08 wrote: post #20
SlipperySlope wrote: post #7

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…

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

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.

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

#30

Post by aroopPandya »

cabirum wrote: post #11

Visual recognition has some room for improvement http://i.imgur.com/V59IeQH.png

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..
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