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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

#51

Post by braindead_in »

picheny wrote: post #25
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…

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?

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

#52

Post by jsstylos »

Poiesis wrote: post #22

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.

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?

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

#53

Post by germanattanasio »

[deleted] wrote: post #48
pesenti wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

I just tried with a Taj Mahal picture and It works.

http://goo.gl/C8cLWp

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

#54

Post by ChuckMcM »

qeorge wrote: post #50
pesenti wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 r…

I tend to disagree. Assuming they are correct on a larger corpus you can start doing things like "only do face matching on pictures with people in them" and weed out photos in a batch that don't have those three properties.

Watson is a training API rather than say the more fanciful emergent AI type API. More data, the better it gets. It is like Google's voice recognition isn't good because someone coded the magic constants for various accents, rather it is good because Google fed it millions of samples of spoken words and corrects it when they get it wrong.

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

#55

Post by qeorge »

germanattanasio wrote: post #53
[deleted] wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I just tried with a Taj Mahal picture and It works. http://goo.gl/C8cLWp

I just tried a photo of the Kremlin, and got Cargo Ship (and ironically, Taj Mahal).

http://easycaptures.com/fs/uploaded/736/8308577082.jpg

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

#56

Post by qeorge »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #54
qeorge wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

I tend to disagree. Assuming they are correct on a larger corpus you can start doing things like "only do face matching on pictures with people in them" and weed out photos in a batch that don't have those three properties. Watson is a training API rather than say the more fanciful emergent AI type API. More data, the better it gets. It is like Google's voice recognition isn't good because someone coded the magic con…

Thanks for your comment. This makes sense - I would use Watson to determine which photos have humans at all, and then run those through, e.g., my facial recognition software. But Watson would keep me from having to waste resources looking for faces in photos of trees, for example.

I'm not in this field, so I'm having trouble understanding what use cases / consumer facing features this API unlocks. Your comment is very helpful in that regard.

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

#58

Post by pesenti »

qeorge wrote: post #55
germanattanasio wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried with a Taj Mahal picture and It works. http://goo.gl/C8cLWp

I just tried a photo of the Kremlin, and got Cargo Ship (and ironically, Taj Mahal). http://easycaptures.com/fs/uploaded/736/8308577082.jpg

The top 7 classes are correct: outdoor color photo of a landmark and historical site with vehicles in the front ;-)

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

#59

Post by josu »

pesenti wrote: post #37
josu wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the Watson platform dependent on the hardware, or do you keep updating the hardware that it runs on?

Given that our strategy is to expose most Watson technology as cloud services we will keep updating the hardware underneath in a way that seamless to the user. We try to leverage the Power architecture as much as possible.

Thanks, that's what I had assumed, however seeing the hardware behind Watson on Jeopardy threw me off [1]. I'm guessing that that was just the first stage.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/IBM-Watson.jpg

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

#60

Post by keelyw »

jcfrei wrote: post #43
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…

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

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
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