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Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

developer.ibm.com

11–20 of 42 posts

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#11
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.

I had to input my credit card once I exceeded the 30-day trial, but I haven't been charged for anything because I'm only using the beta services. And even the Bluemix production services allow free usage up to a certain level, which varies by service.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#12
post #6

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

Hmm .. OK . are there external facing portals to file bugs against the services ?

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hmm .. OK . are there external facing portals to file bugs against the services ?

https://developer.ibm.com/answers/smartspace/watson/ is our forum for issues with the services.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#15
post #9
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...

The old ViaVoice can't compete with Watson Voice & Nuance but would be a good alternative to existing open source voice technology that is years behind. It's highly unlikely that IBM would release such tech, nevertheless it would be appreciated.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#17

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 ,…

I signed up for Bluemix a while back, when the Watson beta was first announced. IBM have been very nice, they keep in touch over email and phone to see what I'm working on (and I don't even have a paid plan). I'd really like to use the platform, but I just can't. For exactly the reasons you specified.

In my last conversation over the phone, trying to set up the tools to work with Bluemix, several "Getting Started" pages for important steps lead to 404 errors.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#18
The ability to create your own models is very important to use this, as your existing ones do a bad job of processing my normal speech. To test I just tried reading a few simple phrases and the error rate is pretty high. The Web Speech API did a great job with the same phrases https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#19
post #15
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The old ViaVoice can't compete with Watson Voice & Nuance but would be a good alternative to existing open source voice technology that is years behind. It's highly unlikely that IBM would release such tech, nevertheless it would be appreciated.

We are flattered by the interest and will look into it; obviously given no one has looked at this for years, it is not a likely possibility.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#20

The ability to create your own models is very important to use this, as your existing ones do a bad job of processing my normal speech. To test I just tried reading a few simple phrases and the error rate is pretty high. The Web Speech API did a great job with the same phrases https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html

Well - I haven't tried the Speech Service myself . But as dev, we notices pretty high error rates with the 'user modeling service' as well.
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