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Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

developer.ibm.com

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Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#21

Post by mind_heist »

There is some thing else I would like to point out as well , IBM folks on this thread can answer the question. This is regarding the "user modeling service" of Watson. I spoke to a couple of IBM folks and asked what are some of the coolest Apps they had seen that was built using Watson - and someone mentioned the following MSNBC article . It's Watson perception about the State of the Union Speech .What the user modelling service does - is to take text as input and sentiment analyze it ( and give outputs around it)

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/how-supercomputer-sees-the-state-...

What the folks @ MSNBC did was to pass the last 10 SOTU speeches to Watson and collate the results over a graph.

But, Here is why I have trouble believing Watson's perception. Try passing the following input to Watson - (or any other gibberish)

"jkldsjglkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjgdfskg dfsgj df gfgdflg;dfg g;fkgljsdfgk;gjldfg dgkjldfgdhfgkjdfhjg fkldskf;ksdlf;ksdlfks jkdhfkhsdjkfhksdhj ljfsdjfhdsjkfjskdhfkjsdhf sdfkls;dkfl; dkfl;sd;fsk roweruoweuroiweuroiwe uweoruweoruweo ruweuro kjgsfgjkldfsjgs klfgjfdsl gjfdlkg fd jkldsjglkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjgdfskg dfsgj df gfgdflg;dfg g;fkgljsdfg kjgsfgjkldfsjgs klfgjfdslgjfdlkg fd jkldsjglkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjgdfskg dfsgj df gfgdflg;dfg g;fkgljsdfg kjgsfgjkldfsjgs klfgjfdsl gjfdlkg fd jkldsjg lkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjg dfskg dfsgj df gfgd flg;dfg g;fkglj sdfg kjgs fgjk ldfsj gs klfgjfds lgjfdlkg fd jkldsjg lkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjg dfskg fsgj df gf gdflg;dfg g;fkglj sdfg kjgsfgjkldfsjgs klfgjfd slgjfdlkg fd jkldsjglk fdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjgdf skg fsgj df gfgdflg;dfg g;fkgl jsdfg kjgsfgjk ldfsjgs klfgjfdslgjfdlkg fd jkldsjg lkfdsj dfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjgdfskg dfsgj f gfgd flg;dfg g;fkgljsdfg kjgsfgjkldfsjgs

fkldskf;ksdlf;ksdlfks jkdhfkhsdjkfhksdhj ljfsdjfhdsjkfjskdhfkjsdhf sdfkls;dkfl; dkfl;sd;fsk roweruoweuroiweuroiwe uweoruweoruweo ruweuro kjgsfgjkldfsjgs klfgjfdsl gjfdlkg fd jkldsjglkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjgdfskg dfsgj df gfgdflg;dfg g;fkgljsdfg kjgsfgjkldfsjgs klfgjfdslgjfdlkg fd jkldsjglkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjgdfskg dfsgj df gfgdflg;dfg g;fkgljsdfg kjgsfgjkldfsjgs klfgjfdsl gjfdlkg fd jkldsjg lkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjg dfskg dfsgj df gfgd flg;dfg g;fkglj sdfg kjgs fgjk ldfsj gs klfgjfds lgjfdlkg fd jkldsjg lkfdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjg dfskg fsgj df gf gdflg;dfg g;fkglj sdfg kjgsfgjkldfsjgs klfgjfd slgjfdlkg fd jkldsjglk fdsjgdfls kg;jsf g dsfg fdg jsdfjgdf skg fsgj df gfgdflg;dfg g;fkgl jsdfg kjgsfgjk ....

=====

And Watson rates it as the following.

Big 5

Openness100% Adventurousness100% Artistic interests2% Emotionality1% Imagination100% Intellect100% Authority-challenging100% Conscientiousness93% Achievement striving94% Cautiousness57% Dutifulness1% Orderliness1% Self-discipline81% Self-efficacy3% Extraversion1% Activity level1% Assertiveness1% Cheerfulness1% Excitement-seeking2% Outgoing1% Gregariousness1% Agreeableness1% Altruism1% Cooperation1% Modesty1% Uncompromising1% Sympathy1% Trust1% Emotional range11% Fiery1% Prone to worry10% Melancholy34% Immoderation24% Self-consciousness6% Susceptible to stress9%

Needs

Challenge61% Closeness84% Curiosity51% Excitement66% Harmony65% Ideal54% Liberty75% Love23% Practicality86% Self-expression25% Stability60% Structure57%

Values

Conservation78% Openness to change5% Hedonism15% Self-enhancement76% Self-transcendence11%

========

Its plain gibberish , and you still get some results. I tried passing other text transliterated to English and Watson still gives results like this. I would expect it to atleast call it out as gibberish-text.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#23

Post by aroopPandya »

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 ,…

Hey..would love to talk to you and others and find out bit more around the issues..I am in sf for next few days..

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#24

Post by picheny »

oomkiller wrote: post #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

It is understandable; different people may see different performance depending on what speech service is used. In addition, please keep in mind this is just a beta service; we have only been out there less than a week and know we still have some tuning to do. We also recognize the need for customization and personalization abilities; keep watching our website for continuing developments.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#25

Post by picheny »

mind_heist wrote: post #21

There is some thing else I would like to point out as well , IBM folks on this thread can answer the question. This is regarding the "user modeling service" of Watson. I spoke to a couple of IBM folks and asked what are some of the coolest Apps they had seen that was built using Watson - and someone mentioned the following MSNBC article . It's Watson perception about the State of the Union Speech .What the user model…

Yeah, you are right we should be filtering this sort of stuff out. The algorithms are robust in that they ignore words not in the system's vocabulary (rather than, say, crash) but we did not trap the case in which none of the "words" are familiar.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#26

Post by sho_hn »

reledi wrote: post #22

Live demos that you can play with: Speech to Text: https://speech-to-text-demo.mybluemix.net Text to Speech: http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net

The speech synthesis is impressive. It's still clearly a computer, but the prosody is a step up from Google and Bing. I threw some random comments I've written at the English Female voice model. It seems capable of contrasting clauses via rising and falling (and handles patterns like "On the other hand, ..." and "She was either ..., or .... when ..." well), makes little dramatic pauses after noun clusters to allow the listener to catch up, inserted a little mental comma into stuff like "greater than x [,] half the time", put emphasis on an "and" after a comma ("[...] something I still haven't gotten used, and am not sure I want to") etc., lots of traits of an aware speaker. Heck, I almost felt like it picked up speed and layered in an ounce of incredulity when it was reading a rant I wrote, but it might just be good enough that I can project into it on that one.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#27

Post by sk5t »

picheny wrote: post #7
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.

Overall the BlueMix and Watson documentation is very green and fair to call alpha-stage. This problem tends to all directions, although if a specific example would be helpful, trying to discover what load balancing options exist within BlueMix was something I tried and failed to learn last week.

For a Watson-specific example, at least a few months ago it was the case that putting together a full-featured client implementation for Q&A required poking around several obscure webpages and then plenty of runtime experimentation on top.

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#29

Post by ilyaeck »

picheny wrote: post #10
mind_heist wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The ASR seems to be a bit immature, but the TTS sounds very nice. Any plans to add more voices?

Re: Watson now brings cognitive speech capabilities to developers

#30

Post by ilyaeck »

It looks like IBM is getting serious about Watson, but still not serious enough. To create an ecosystem and incentivize developers to work through all the issues, IBM should probably create an investment fund for startups who build their products based on Watson. Any such plans?
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