IBM continues to add new capabilities to Watson artificial intelligence system (AI) with new functions that cover social media, productivity and a variety of other applications.
In addition to the new capabilities, IBM announced that it is establishing a new Watson hub located in San Francisco, which will also serve as the new global headquarters for IBM commerce.
Watson started with one initial application programming interface (API), which it used to win against human competitors in the popular TV quiz show Jeopardy. The AI system now features over 25 APIs that are powered by over 50 different technologies, with IBM claiming that there are currently over 100 commercial applications that are using Watson.
IBM revealed new computing services to be able to get more developers to use Watson, with the services coming in the form of APIs which are accessible through the Bluemix cloud development platform of IBM. Organizations which use the APIs in commercial applications would be paying a share of the revenue to IBM, while those that use the APIs internally pay IBM depending on the number of calls to the API that they make.
Among the new services is Visual Insights, which is capable of analyzing pictures and videos posted by users to social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The API will then look for trends and patterns that can be seen in the posts being analyzed, with Watson turning the information into structured data that can be easily loaded into a database.
The most obvious use for Visual Insights would be for marketing, as applications built with Visual Insights would provide companies with a more comprehensive view on the interests of its target market.
Another new service named Dialogue will allow the development of branching conversations between users and applications to allow computers to walk users through the steps of completing a certain task, for example. This could lead for more machines to work on customer service, freeing up humans for other critical roles.
IBM has also made improvements to the Speech to Text and Text to Speech APIs, which would be useful for developing digital personal assistants such as Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana.
The goal of Watson is to augment the decision-making of humans, not replace them. Watson can provide the answers based on millions of possibilities that humans will not be able to process on their own, but ultimately, it will be the human who makes the decision.
