IBM Introduces New Beta Services to the Watson Developer Cloud

IBM is releasing five new beta services to the Watson Developer Cloud which makes available the IBM Watson technology as a development platform in the cloud to build apps utilizing Watson's cognitive computing intelligence. 

The platform offers a collection of REST APIs and SDKs that use Watson’s cognitive computing to solve complex problems. Watson APIs are adaptable, interactive and contextual in the way they provide information. Instead of returning prepared responses, these APIs provide answers based on what they know to be correct, relying on information they’ve acquired over time.

- Speech to Text: Cloud-based, real-time services to use highly accurate, low latency speech recognition capabilities to convert speech into text for voice-controlled mobile applications and transcription services. The service applies machine intelligence related to grammar and language structures within a specific context to generate a more accurate transcription. 

- Text to Speech: Supporting translation in both English and Spanish and providing the option of three voices across the two languages, this service understands text and natural language to generate synthesized audio output complete with appropriate cadence and intonation. 

- Visual Recognition: By analyzing the visual appearance of various forms of media, Visual Recognition helps users collect and organize large sets of visual data to build semantic associations. Using machine learning technology, classifiers recognize an array of visual entities such as settings, objects, and events to analyze and understand the content of images and videos. 

- Concept Insights: A technology to look at text in a conceptual manner, Concept Insights delivers a search capability that discovers new insights on text compared to traditional keyword searches, Concept Insights links user-provided documents with a pre-existing graph of concepts based on Wikipedia (e.g. 'The New York Times', 'Machine learning', etc.). Two types of links are identified: explicit links, or when a document directly mentions a concept, and implicit links, which connect the user’s documents to relevant concepts that are not directly mentioned. 

- Tradeoff Analytics: Tradeoff Analytics helps users make better choices by dynamically weighing multiple and often conflicting goals. This service uses Pareto filtering techniques to identify the optimal alternatives across multiple criteria. It then employs various analytical and visual approaches to help the decision maker explore tradeoffs and alternatives. Tradeoff Analytics can be used to help make complex decisions, including identifying optimal mortgage structures, treatment options for medical patients, and automobiles for car buyers. 

Developers can start using these new services immediately which are available for free on Bluemix, IBM's Cloud Platform. Overall there are now thirteen beta Services now available as the IBM Watson Group continues expanding its developer ecosystem and the company has created a quick start guide on how to get up and running quickly with Watson Services for Bluemix.