The IBM Watson developer cloud just got five more free beta services added to its inventory, which will expand IBM Watson capabilities to images, speech, and analytics, the IT giant reported Wednesday.
The five new services now available on Bluemix are:
- Speech to Text : This is a cloud-based, real-time service that uses low latency speech recognition capabilities to convert speech into text for voice-controlled mobile applications, transcription services, and more. Based on more than 50 years of speech research at IBM, its use cases include voice control over apps, transcription of meetings and conference calls in real-time.
- Text to Speech : Text to Speech converts textual input into speech, and provides the option of three voices in English or Spanish, including the American English voice used by Watson in the 2011 Jeopardy match. Text to Speech generates synthesized audio output complete with appropriate cadence and intonation. It could find usage in assistance of visually impaired.
- Visual Recognition : This service analyzes the visual appearance of images or video frames to understand their content. It’ll help in organizing and ingesting large collections of digital images, drawing semantic association between images from multiple sources and provide insight into consumer shopping behavior based on image queries.
- Concept Insights : This service handles text in a conceptual way, delivering a search capability that discovers new insights on text compared to traditional keyword searches. It’ll help improve search queries with more intuitive results,
- Tradeoff Analytics : Helps users make better choices by weighing multiple and often conflicting goals. It can be utilized by retailers and manufacturers to determine product mix, also allowing consumers to compare and contrast competitive products or services and helping physicians decide on optimal treatment methods.
This is second such release, trailed by the offering of eight beta Watson services for the developer community to test and develop by harnessing Watson’s capabilities, in order to “harden each service as we prepare them for general availability,” explains IBM.
From Language Identification and Machine Translation to Visualization Rendering and User Modeling, the beta services are being embedded into a new class of cognitive apps. So far over 5,000 partners, developers, data hobbyists, entrepreneurs, students and others have contributed to building 6,000+ apps infused with Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities, claims IBM.
Read IBM’s full blogpost here.
(Image credit: Anirudh Koul, via Flickr)
