New services expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and more • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by taf2 » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:31 PM UTC

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…

yes but how do you sign up for either service?

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

#42

Post by _delirium » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:34 PM UTC

johnward wrote: post #35

corin_ wrote: post #29

@IBM people: Is there any information available yet either regarding future pricing, or regarding timeline for getting pricing information?

Someone else posted this but here is the bluemix pricing page: https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing

That gives the pricing for running compute instances on BlueMix, but at the moment there's no pricing for these Watson services, since they're free-while-in-beta. Presumably post-beta there will be some kind of charge per N queries, like the other out-of-beta services (e.g. the Business Rules service charges $1.00 per 1000 API calls), but there's not currently an indication of when that's likely to happen and/or the likely price range.

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

#43

Post by jcfrei » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:35 PM UTC

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?

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

#44

Post by taf2 » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:36 PM UTC

johnward wrote: post #17

niels_olson wrote: post #13

In other news, Watson will be RA'd at the end of the month.

If anyone is not going to be RA'd it's Watson group. There is a lot riding on the success of Watson.

if only they had a credit card signup page... you know to let people pay for it...

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

#45

Post by Poiesis » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:36 PM UTC

aroopPandya wrote: post #34

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.

take a look @ https://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developerc... . There is also doc link once you click on the service you have bounded. There are samples in java and nodejs. (samples coming soon in github)

I did indeed take a look at the docs. That's why I commented. If there's documentation of REST end points, it's not obvious to me. Maybe someone else will point out what I'm missing.

As far as I can tell, most of the documentation essentially begins, "First, deploy a web app on our platform". Which is fine I guess, but isn't nearly as simple as the HTTP APIs you see from many other recent SaaS providers. As least for me, I'm pretty unlikely to jump through those hoops. Maybe others will be different.

Edit: All the way down on the bottom of the documentation page, past the research references, there's a link to HTTP API documentation--literally the last link on the page.

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

#46

Post by picheny » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:39 PM UTC

taf2 wrote: post #41

picheny wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yes but how do you sign up for either service?

you mean ibms service?

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

#47

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:39 PM UTC

pesenti wrote: post #40

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 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]

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

#48

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:40 PM UTC

pesenti wrote: post #40

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 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]

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

#49

Post by tparikh » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:41 PM UTC

taf2 wrote: post #39

How do I signup and pay them money?

Watson services on Bluemix are currently in beta. You can use the beta services at no charge, even after your 30 day Bluemix trial, although you will need to provide a credit card to Bluemix. You will not incur any charges unless you use any of the production services.

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

#50

Post by qeorge » Thu, Feb 05, 2015, 4:42 PM UTC

pesenti wrote: post #40

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 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 results?

What confidence from Watson would you say indicates an answer that is probably accurate? And how confident are you that Watson's self-reported confidence is accurate?