Machine Learning, the type of Artificial Intelligence, is being used in various domains and in interesting ways. It is being used for text, image and video recognition and serves as the power behind recommendation engines. To explain in simple words, how it does this, it allows you to look at volumes of data and do large volumes of calculations that a human can’t do actually.
IBM introduced Watson to the world, as a Watson cloud service that brings development tool kit, access to Watson API, an application marketplace and educational material about IBM’s supercomputer. IBM’s new expanded cognitive APIs for developers has resulted in enhanced visual and emotional senses of Watson. IBM Watson Technologies is a ‘powerful platform for cognitive business.’ It represents cognitive computing, where computers or systems can understand and respond to world as humans through senses, learning and experience.
What is Watson?
Today more than 80% of the total data is unstructured. Watson analyse this unstructured data that includes research reports, news articles, enterprise system data and social media posts. Watson uses natural language processing to understand the context and evaluates all possible meanings to determine what exactly is asked to it. Based on the evidences and quality of information it could gather, it presents the best possible solution to your question.
But how Watson first learns everything?
– All the related information is loaded in forms of word docs, pdfs, and webpages into the system.
– Watson is then trained on various subjects with pairs of questions and answers.
– Watson is updated automatically whenever the new information is published.
How Watson analyses and answers the question?
Watson analyses the data and answers the questions by following a program that allow it to take a more informed decision. It can give answers and recommendations in various diverse domains like medical, law, cooking, etc. It also learns from its failure and success.
It can generate varied patterns of questions and answers that we hadn’t known it existed, faster than any group of number of experts. It not only look for keyword matches and synonyms but also reads and interprets like human by breaking down the sentence grammatically, relationally and structurally.
Watson is different from simple speech recognition technology (computer translating human speech into set of words), because it also understands the context. Watson using the algorithm, tries to understand the meaning and provide insightful responses through a broader way of linguistic models and algorithms.
Watson learns, adapts and keep getting smarter. It learns more from its interactions with humans. Watson doesn’t answer if it is having the confidence of less than 50% on the supporting evidences. Watson knows what it knows and it knows what it does not know. IBM is pushing knowledge of deep analytics and natural language processing forward through this.
Building apps using IBM Watson Developer Cloud
IBM is bringing the cognitive technology to your app through IBM Watson Developer Cloud. It is a library of Watson APIs to create apps powered by Watson Apps.
Watson APIs – From gaining insights from texts to analysing images and video, power of Watson APIs can help build cognitive apps. Watson APIs consists of three APIs:
– Tone Analyzer
– Emotion Analysis
– Visual Recognition
These APIs have enhanced SDKs (Node, Java, Python, newly introduced iOS Swift and Unity), which help developers to customize and build apps with Watson.
Tone Analyser empower apps with deeper analysis capabilities. It provides people with unmatched level of perspective about kind of responses coming from audience. For example, in customer service, it can help analyse different kinds of emotional, social and writing tones.
Emotion Analysis uses natural processing language to analyse content and helps users understand emotion of others in a better way. Now apart from identifying positive and negative sentiments, developers can now distinguish between large scale of emotions.
Visual Recognition is beyond visual capabilities and can be trained to identify and classify images. It allows developers to train Watson about custom classifiers for images. Thus developers can build apps that can visually identify unique ideas and concepts.
Lets checkout different apps built using power of Watson APIs and cognitive technology.
Business Intelligence: It analyses social media and news to understand how people are talking about your company. It can also understand important topics and how other people are feeling about those topics.
Audio Analysis: It transcribes audio and depending upon its concept, the app presents recommendations. How it works?
1. It first analyses Video plays and audio.
2. Then the audio is transcribed
3. It gathers concepts from its database.
4. Based on its confidence level, it concepts are ranked.
5. It presents recommendations based on top ranked concepts.
Conversational Agent: It gives an engaging experience. It allows you to chat with Watson to find out new movies depending on genre and rating.
IBM Bluemix is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that enables developers to build and run apps in the cloud.
How Watson is being used by different companies?
Watson is powering many applications by now for industries present across various domains. Watson is making a great impact through applications. Few of the industries, where Watson powered applications are already reflecting a great impact, are: Healthcare, Retail, Law and Finance Industries.
Healthcare Industry
Watson powered applications have been used in some of reputed Cancer hospitals where it is helping with cancer patient care as well as research. It helps physicians with diagnoses using its vision recognition power and can read X-Ray and MRI scans for doctors in a more focused way.
Retail Industry
Watson is helping through applications in retail industry by making retail experiences more personalised. For example, it can present the products to customers at a very suitable point of buying cycle. Apps can also intake and analyse the data to offer additional services based on customer’s preferences during online travel purchases.
Finance Industry
In this domain, Watson’s typical question and answers capability can be used. Watson powered financial applications can not only answer the question but it also analyses the question. It can give the financial advice as well as can also help in managing risks associated with financing. It ensures great customer experience for users seeking wealth management.
Thus, developing cognitive computing applications can allow it to interact with humans through natural language and bringing big data insights to explore.
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