IBM Watson Overview

What is IBM Watson?

IBM Watson is a system based on cognitive computing. You can say, IBM Watson is a system which will provide answer(s) to your question(s).

It is not programmed; like humans of course not emotionally, they learn from experts and from every interaction, and they are uniquely able to find patterns in big data. They learn by using advanced algorithms to sense, predict and infer. Doing so, they augment human intelligence, allowing individuals to make faster and more informed decisions.

What is Cognitive computing?

Cognitive computing describes technology platforms that encompass machine learning, reasoning, natural language processing, speech recognition and vision (object recognition), human–computer interaction, dialog and narrative generation, among other technologies.

What are the features of Cognitive Computing?

Here are some of the features of Cognitive Computing:

Adaptive: They may learn as information changes, and as goals and requirements evolve. They may resolve ambiguity and tolerate unpredictability. They may be engineered to feed on dynamic data in real time, or near real time.

Interactive: They may interact easily with users so that those users can define their needs comfortably. They may also interact with other processors, devices, and Cloud services, as well as with people.

Iterative and stateful: They may aid in defining a problem by asking questions or finding additional source input if a problem statement is ambiguous or incomplete. They may "remember" previous interactions in a process and return information that is suitable for the specific application at that point in time.

Contextual: They may understand, identify, and extract contextual elements such as meaning, syntax, time, location, appropriate domain, regulations, user’s profile, process, task and goal. They may draw on multiple sources of information, including both structured and unstructured digital information, as well as sensory inputs (visual, gestural, auditory, or sensor-provided).

What are IBM Watson Services?

IBM’s Watson services are classified under the following categories:

• Conversation
• Knowledge
• Vision
• Speech
• Language
• Empathy

Conversation:

This module helps to quickly build and deploy chatbots and virtual agents across a variety of channels, including mobile devices, messaging platforms, and even robots.

Conversation

Conversation is maintained by chatbots that understand natural language and deploy them on messaging platforms and websites, on any device with the following features: Developer friendly Easy to begin, easy to use. Get faster time to value, and integrate across channels, networks and environments. Enterprise grade Conversation features a reliable infrastructure that scales with individual use cases. Platform support from IBM gives you the backing you need. Robust and secure Own your data. IBM protects your privacy, allowing you to opt out of data sharing. Built on IBM Cloud and featuring reliable tooling with industry-leading security.

Virtual Agent

This is a bot for customer service with the following features: Pre-trained industry & domain knowledge Personalized configuration Engagement metrics dashboard User friendly tooling Self-service delivered by bots Deep analytic capabilities Up and running in no time

Knowledge:

This module gets insights through accelerated data optimization capabilities.

Discovery	Unlock hidden value in data to find answers, monitor trends and surface patterns with the world’s most advanced cloud-native insight engine with the following features: Rapid results Spend less time struggling with your data. Automated ingestion and integrated natural language processing in a fully managed cloud service removes the complexity from dealing with natural language content. Domain intelligence Easily adapt Discovery’s understanding of your corpus with integrated machine learning to surface the most relevant answers. Teach Discovery to apply the knowledge of unique entities and relations in your industry or organization with Watson Knowledge Studio. AI ready for business Uncover deep connections throughout your data by using advanced AI functions out of the box, such as natural language queries, passage retrieval, relevancy training, relationship graphs and anomaly detection.
Discovery News	Access pre-enriched news content in real-time with the following features: Intelligence infused news: Explore news and blogs with smarter news from Watson that includes concepts, sentiment, relationships and categories. Watson also identifies important meta-information – like authors, publication dates, and relevant keywords. See the big picture: By discovering trends and patterns in sentiment with aggregate analysis, you’ll see new perspectives on how news unfolds across the globe. You can also track recent historical trends across millions of articles and stories. Stay alert: Surface anomalies, key events and embed news alerts into your application and workflows. Stay abreast of the latest information about key competitors, product and brand perception, events, industry experts and more.
Natural Language Understanding	Natural language processing for advanced text analytics with the following features: Uncover insights from structured and unstructured data: Analyze text to extract meta-data from content such as concepts, entities, keywords, categories, relations and semantic roles. Understand sentiment and emotion: Returns both overall sentiment and emotion for a document, and targeted sentiment and emotion towards keywords in the text for deeper analysis. Grasp multiple languages: NLU understands text in nine languages, and through customization with Watson Knowledge Studio.
Knowledge studio	Teach Watson to discover meaningful insights in unstructured text. It is a cloud-based application that enables developers and domain experts to collaborate and create custom annotator components for unique industries These annotators can identify mentions and relationships in unstructured data and be easily administered throughout their lifecycle using one common tool.
Document Conversion	Document Conversion features are now available in Watson Discovery. Its features include: Convert to different file types: Convert a single HTML, PDF, or Microsoft Word™ document into HTML, plain text, or a set of JSON-formatted Answer units that can be used with other Watson services. Convert in multiple languages: Document Conversion supports content in English, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish.

Vision:

Identify, tag content then analyze and extract detailed information found in an image.

Visual Recognition

Tag, classify and search visual content using Machine Learning with the following features: Classify virtually any visual content: Visual Recognition understands the contents of images. Analyze images for scenes, objects, faces, colors, food, and other subjects that can give you insights into your visual content. Create your own classifiers: Create and train your custom image classifiers using your own image collections.

Speech:

Convert text and speech with the ability to customize models.

Speech to Text

Easily convert the audio and voice into written text with the following features: Powerful real-time speech recognition: Automatically transcribe audio from 7 languages in real-time. Rapidly identify and transcribe what is being discussed, even from lower quality audio, across a variety of audio formats and programming interfaces (HTTP REST, Websocket, Asynchronous HTTP) Highly accurate speech engine: Customize your model to improve accuracy for language and content you care most about, such as product names, sensitive subjects or names of individuals. Recognizes different speakers in your audio Spot specified keywords in real-time with high accuracy and confidence Built to support various use cases: Transcribe audio for various use cases ranging from real-time transcription for audio from a microphone, to analyzing 1000s of audio recording from your call center to provide meaningful analytics

Text to Speech

Convert written text into natural-sounding audio in a variety of languages and voices with the following features: Enable your systems to “speak” like humans: Develop interactive toys for children, automate call center interactions, communicate directions hands-free, and beyond Customize and control pronunciation: Deliver a seamless voice interaction that caters to your audience with control over every word Synthesizes across languages and voices: Convert in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. Detects different dialects, such as U.S. and UK English and Castilian, Latin American, and North American Spanish.

Language:

Analyze text and extract meta-data from unstructured content.

Language Translator	Translate text from one language to another. Take news from across the globe and present it in your language, communicate with your customers in their own language, and more with the following features: Translate your content Language Translator translates text from one language to another. The service offers multiple domain-specific models: Conversational (English, Arabic, French, Portuguese and Spanish), News (English, Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Korean and Spanish) and Patent (English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean and Portuguese). Customize your translations Customize the translations based on your unique terminology and language. Language Translator supports three types of customization: forced glossary, parallel phrases and corpus-level customization. It’s your data Unlike other translation services, IBM protects your privacy, you own your data.
Natural Language Classifier	Interpret and classify natural language with confidence with the following features: Classify text passages Understand the intent behind text and returns a corresponding classification, complete with a confidence score. Evaluate results Update training data based on classification results and create and train a classifier using updated training data. Build conversational applications Answer questions in a contact center, create chatbots, and categorize volumes of written content and more.
Retrieve and Rank	Retrieve and Rank features are now available in Watson Discovery and is deprecated as a stand-alone service.

Empathy:

Understand tone, personality, and emotional state.

Personality Insights

Predict personality characteristics, needs and values through written text. Understand your customers’ habits and preferences on an individual level, and at scale. The following are few of its features: Get detailed personality portraits: Use linguistic analytics to infer individuals' personality characteristics, including Big Five, Needs, and Values, from digital communications such as email, blogs, tweets, and forum posts. Understand consumption preferences: Look at a user’s inclination to pursue different products, services, and activities, including shopping, music, movies, and more. Tailor the customer experience: Understand individual customers for segmentation, personalized product recommendations, and highly targeted messaging.

Tone Analyzer

Understand emotions and communication style in text with the following features: Conduct social listening: Analyze emotions and tones in what people write online, like tweets or reviews. Predict whether they are happy, sad, confident, and more. Enhance customer service: Monitor customer service and support conversations so you can respond to your customers appropriately and at scale. See if customers are satisfied or frustrated, and if agents are polite and sympathetic. Integrate with chatbots: Enable your chatbot to detect customer tones so you can build dialog strategies to adjust the conversation accordingly.