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

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

#81
post #50
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

It's actually very useful if it can detect with reasonable confidence that there is a person in a picture.

One example of a use is at Kiva we require borrowers to have a picture of themselves posted for their loan. But sometimes we get pictures of things like goats or cows instead (those are kind of nice to but gotta follow policy). Currently this is something we have to manually review for, but if we could automate that review piece it would save a lot of time (especially if at some point it could also count the number of humans in a photo).

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

#82
post #32

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'm pretty sure it was sarcasm. IBM is infamous for their massive patent portfolio. Just about anybody who knows about patents knows that IBM has a metric ton of them.

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

#83
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…

Compare that to clarifai: http://i.imgur.com/BsWdpUA.jpg

portrait

youth

fashion

facial expression

women

european

girl

model

female

actress

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

#84
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

It's actually very useful if it can detect with reasonable confidence that there is a person in a picture. One example of a use is at Kiva we require borrowers to have a picture of themselves posted for their loan. But sometimes we get pictures of things like goats or cows instead (those are kind of nice to but gotta follow policy). Currently this is something we have to manually review for, but if we could automate…

Check out Clarifai. They have an image recognition API. It might be able to help detect people in the photo.

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

#85

So the gist of what I'm seeing in this thread is, "Watson's API services aren't very good yet, but they will get better as it collects and processes more data". So basically, IBM is charging us to provide it with training data to make Watson useful for practical applications. Makes sense, but I can't help but feel that it would be a smarter move to skip charging entirely for now, or to use drastically reduced pricing…

Real value is heuristics. or learning algorithms to refine heuristics. Data is always growing.

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

#86

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…

For TTS, compare further with Vocalware and CereProc

Vocalware https://www.vocalware.com/index/demo CereProc https://www.cereproc.com/

It is getting increasingly difficult to pick one as the clear leader for "natural sounding". The results are good enough for voicing canned text, and certainly better enunciated than many thick-accented English speakers. Improvements through training can still be made in parsing the text.

For example, IBM Watson interprets "IT" as "it", in the following sentence.

Thank you for calling the IT department.

Vocalware and CereProc correctly parse that.

Who I would really like to hear opinions from are professional voice actors, though they would tend to be understandably leery to lend a hand to improve TTS. Is there a standardized form of writing text that communicates the kind of emphasis, placement of silence and warping of phonemes these actors use in their delivery to concisely convey emotion, that TTS products can adopt?

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

#87

So the gist of what I'm seeing in this thread is, "Watson's API services aren't very good yet, but they will get better as it collects and processes more data". So basically, IBM is charging us to provide it with training data to make Watson useful for practical applications. Makes sense, but I can't help but feel that it would be a smarter move to skip charging entirely for now, or to use drastically reduced pricing…

Should the training data set be open-source?

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

#89
Text to speech is pretty good. http://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/?cm_mmc=developerWo...

I decided to test it a little. I copied phonem challenges and non-sensical phrasing from the web. Then I added some stuff that I know has problems from past experience.

----- Let's explore some complicated conversions, shall we? The old corn cost the blood. The wrong shot led the farm. The short arm sent the cow. How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend? Don't desert me here in the desert!. They were too close to the door to close it. The buck does funny things when does are present. Today is 1/1/2015. Today is Jan 5th, 1992. It's currently half past 12. Or 12:30PM. Twenty thousand dollars. 20,000 dollars. 20 thousand dollars. 2^5 = 32. NASA is an acronym. This ... is a pause. EmailAddress@somedomain.com.

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

#90
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…

I find it terribly confusing. It does not explain what instances are, do I need an instance to access some of the services?

I just want to access some services via API from my own servers. I think the documentation is not that good, there should be curl examples at least. For instance, for the STT or TTS include some curl examples.

Does the STT have speaker identification or does it output text in one stream?

I tried to access: https://gateway-s.watsonplatform.net:8443/speech-to-text-bet...

I used my bluemix l/p. It did not work. Are there other api credentials that are needed?

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