IBM Watson Now Available to Developers on Bluemix PaaS

IBM (IBM) rolled out the general availability of Watson on its Bluemix platform-as-a-service (PaaS) yesterday, which Big Blue says will make Watson available to millions of developers around the world.

The announcement puts Watson’s cognitive services and tools in the hands of developers for mobile and web app development, which IBM noted will be used by companies of all sizes, from startups to international enterprises. It also will mean the ability for those developers to build cognitive services directly into their applications by developing apps on Bluemix—a potentially powerful tool for developers.

To make this possible, IBM also opened five Watson Client Experience Centers, as well as the Watson World HQ. (Unfortunately, IBM bungled the headquarters location and placed it in Silicon Alley instead of on Baker Street in London. But no corporate entity is perfect.)

The move to put Watson on Bluemix was inevitable, and it’s a nice follow-up to IBM’s January 2014 launch of the IBM Watson Group, a new business unit dedicated to developing and commercializing cloud-delivered cognitive advisors. Big Blue is infusing the Watson Group with $1 billion to bring cloud-based cognitive applications and services to market.

With partners now able to access Watson through Bluemix, IBM has taken another critical step in making Watson a core focus for its development community.

New Watson services available in Bluemix include:

• User Modeling, which uses linguistic analytics to extract a set of personality and social traits from the way a person communicates. It can analyze public communication, including text messages, tweets, posts and email.
• Machine Translation, which converts text input in one language into a destination language. Translation is so far available in English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and French.
• Language Identification, which detects the language in which text is written. Its goal is to inform the next steps, such as translation, voice-to-text, or direct analysis. It currently can identify 15 languages.
• Concept Expansion, which analyzes text and interprets its meaning based on usage in similar contexts. Take, for instance, its ability to interpret “The Big Apple” as “New York City.”
• Message Resonance, which analyzes draft content and scores how well it is likely to be received by a specific target audience.
• Relationship Extraction, which parses sentences into components and detects relationships between those components. It maps relationships between the components so users or analytic engines can more easily understand the meaning of individual sentences and documents.
• Question & Answer, which interprets and answers user questions directly based on primary data sources that have been selected and gathered into a body or “corpus.” The service returns candidate responses with associated confidence levels and links to supporting evidence.
• Visualization Rendering, which takes input data and graphically renders it as an interactive visualization in a variety of formats.