Output from text-to-speech sounds reasonably natural - more than, say, the output from the Web Speech API - though with a slightly stilted, robotic flavor. Most speech-to-text transcription systems are liable to have comprehension problems, and Watson is no exception. Though they don't break new ground, they're consumable as a straightforward API via Watson. The text-to-speech and speech-to-text services are much more familiar territory. Right now the service uses Wikipedia as the basis for its concept graph (it's not clear if Watson uses the live version of Wikipedia or a manually cleaned static snapshot), though a user can provide one instead. Concept insights lets you provide a concept - say, solar energy - and returns documents that are conceptually or thematically related to the topic, a kind of knowledge-graph search engine. Some of the other services make more immediately visible use of Watson's existing trove of data. When I asked IBM's Jeffrey Stylos (Software Engineer, Watson Platform Services) how this was superior to a mere spreadsheet, he replied, "This is due to the server-side analysis that automatically culls provably suboptimal choices. For example, in the Finance data set on the demo, 86 of the 115 input options are automatically elided." (He wasn't able to go into more detail on how this service will be explicitly powered by Watson, saying only, "There are lots of long-term plans for Watson.") Watson is said to cull the data intelligently, although details are still vague. IBM Watson's Tradeoff Analytics system creates an interactive decision-making tool from a supplied data set. IBM's live demonstration includes interactive examples like choosing a mutual fund based on multiple criteria (minimal risk, maximal long-term return, and so on) or selecting the best phone based on price. The new services, announced earlier today in a blog post, cover five new beta services: speech to text, text to speech, visual recognition, concept insights, and trade-off analytics. The last of those is a common in business decision-making one provides a set of data and the service attempts to determine the best options for behaviors. With it comes a paradox: The most immediately useful services aren't very impressive yet, while the more technologically impressive services might struggle to find an audience or face competition from existing services. IBM has unveiled five new in-beta services for Watson Developer Cloud, its Bluemix-hosted system for creating applications that plug into the machine learning service. IBM's Watson now (sort of) knows a cat when it sees one.
0 kommentar(er)
