Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#1

Post by pesenti » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers
developer.ibm.com

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#2

Post by Yhippa » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:35 PM UTC

Has anyone used Bluemix past the 30-day trial? It looks like you get 375 GB-hours. That sounds like quite a lot of time. It sounds like as a developer I can mess around with their beta services and not worry about paying anything.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#3

Post by mind_heist » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:39 PM UTC

Hmm ... I along with a couple of my friends spent the last two days at the DeveloperWeek hackathon trying to explore Watson's capabilites. IBM's PaaS solution is called BlueMix and all of Watson's capabilities are available as Services for you to use.

We tried using the "tradeoff Analytics" service for the project - and I must say , the tools and help available around it, the API and its documentation is pretty bad , convoluted and unusable. This is true too other services available through watson too.

We looked into IoT ( Internet of things ) as well . And once again , ran into a ton of dead ends without being able to proceed. The API documentation and examples just suck . If you are used to playing around with well documented APIs / Tools / Languages - this is going to be frustrating.

If the OP is the person who actually wrote the article , please please please go back to Watson Dev Cloud or BlueMix and try it out your services and APIs an a consumer.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#4

Post by mind_heist » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

Yhippa wrote: post #2

Has anyone used Bluemix past the 30-day trial? It looks like you get 375 GB-hours. That sounds like quite a lot of time. It sounds like as a developer I can mess around with their beta services and not worry about paying anything.

You should give it a try . I have a 30-day trial account and spun up a couple of services. Well the UI is cool , and there are a lot of templates ( boiler plates ) that you could use to get you app up and running. But you might struggle with respect to documentation depending on what services you use. A lot Watson stuff is in Beta ( you could see it when you login to Bluemix) - and you might have troubles with them.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#5

Post by frik » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:47 PM UTC

In 1999 IBM released a free version of ViaVoice (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ViaVoice). IBM sold ViaVoice in 2003 and all distribution functions passed to ScanSoft, now called Nuance (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/pervasive/viavoice.html). Does IBM still own the whole stack, or is it based on Nuance code?

Are there plans to open up parts of the older voice technology and contribute it e.g. to CMU Sphinx?

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#6

Post by jsstylos » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:48 PM UTC

mind_heist wrote: post #3

Hmm ... I along with a couple of my friends spent the last two days at the DeveloperWeek hackathon trying to explore Watson's capabilites. IBM's PaaS solution is called BlueMix and all of Watson's capabilities are available as Services for you to use. We tried using the "tradeoff Analytics" service for the project - and I must say , the tools and help available around it, the API and its documentation is pretty bad ,…

Hi, sorry you didn't have a good experience with the API and documentation. I'd love to get some more details on what the stumbling blocks were. Thanks, jsstylos@us.ibm.com

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#7

Post by picheny » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:48 PM UTC

mind_heist wrote: post #3

Hmm ... I along with a couple of my friends spent the last two days at the DeveloperWeek hackathon trying to explore Watson's capabilites. IBM's PaaS solution is called BlueMix and all of Watson's capabilities are available as Services for you to use. We tried using the "tradeoff Analytics" service for the project - and I must say , the tools and help available around it, the API and its documentation is pretty bad ,…

We really appreciate the comments and will try to fix the problems. To be honest, sometimes developers can't see even the most obvious flaws in documentation. If you can highlight even one incomprehensible point it would help a lot to accelerate the revision process.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#8

Post by picheny » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #5

In 1999 IBM released a free version of ViaVoice ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ViaVoice ). IBM sold ViaVoice in 2003 and all distribution functions passed to ScanSoft, now called Nuance ( http://www-01.ibm.com/software/pervasive/viavoice.html ). Does IBM still own the whole stack, or is it based on Nuance code? Are there plans to open up parts of the older voice technology and contribute it e.g. to CMU Sphinx?

We only gave up the shrinkwrap product; the core technology stayed with IBM.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#9

Post by picheny » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:56 PM UTC

frik wrote: post #5

In 1999 IBM released a free version of ViaVoice ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ViaVoice ). IBM sold ViaVoice in 2003 and all distribution functions passed to ScanSoft, now called Nuance ( http://www-01.ibm.com/software/pervasive/viavoice.html ). Does IBM still own the whole stack, or is it based on Nuance code? Are there plans to open up parts of the older voice technology and contribute it e.g. to CMU Sphinx?

Sorry, I missed the question at the bottom. We were very proud of ViaVoice at the time but to make an obvious point, the technology has moved on a lot over the past ten or so years...

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#10

Post by picheny » Mon, Feb 09, 2015, 8:58 PM UTC

mind_heist wrote: post #4

Yhippa wrote: post #2

Has anyone used Bluemix past the 30-day trial? It looks like you get 375 GB-hours. That sounds like quite a lot of time. It sounds like as a developer I can mess around with their beta services and not worry about paying anything.

You should give it a try . I have a 30-day trial account and spun up a couple of services. Well the UI is cool , and there are a lot of templates ( boiler plates ) that you could use to get you app up and running. But you might struggle with respect to documentation depending on what services you use. A lot Watson stuff is in Beta ( you could see it when you login to Bluemix) - and you might have troubles with them.

Beta is certainly beta but if you find problems we will try to fix them as quickly as we can. Real users of technologies tend to find issues with the technology much faster than the actual developers...