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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

#71

Post by picheny »

frik wrote: post #69
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 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

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

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

#72

Post by picheny »

josu wrote: post #59
pesenti wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah it was. At the risk of waxing about old history, when we demoed the first large vocabulary speech recognition system back in 1984 it ran on a bunch of IBM mainframes. Within two years it was running on a PC with some special purpose cards. Today much more powerful recognizers run locally on smartphones. We have always found we can shrink something down once we solve the basic problem, and it is important not to let computational limitations prevent you from seeing the best solution.

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

#73

Post by picheny »

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?

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.

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

#75

Post by kastnerkyle »

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…

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

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

#76

Post by blumkvist »

mmf wrote: post #32
CrazyCatDog wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Care to provide some backing info on your statement? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_paten...

I think that was sarcasm.

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

#77

Post by cypher543 »

kastnerkyle wrote: post #75
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…

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

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...

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

#78

Post by cypher543 »

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…

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

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

#79

Post by bane »

qeorge wrote: post #36

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…

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.

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

#80

Post by kastnerkyle »

cypher543 wrote: post #77
kastnerkyle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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...

Thanks! I am working in this area and have some ideas for deep learning type methods which move away from concatenative synthesis. It will be nice to compare to what they are using.
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