IBM Watson improves its cognitive abilities and offers new opportunities for developers.

IBM is constantly adding new features and capabilities to its Watson cognitive system. This time, the system was taught to study and analyze certain photos and images on the Web, located in various places, including social resources. This will help Watson know what a certain user is doing, what his interests and hobbies are. This feature is one of many dozens that are available to users of the system. Now there are already more than 100 commercial applications that exploit the capabilities of Watson, and this is far from the limit - today more and more developers are working with IBM Watson.

The goal is to create applications and services for medicine (for example, personalized cancer treatment), marketing departments of companies, meteorologists, nuclear physicists and other branches of science and business. Working with IBM Watson is possible thanks to the system API, with access to the latter through the IBM Bluemix cloud platform. As for the study and analysis of images, this service is called Visual Insights. You can work with it not only with photos, but also with videos that are uploaded to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

Visual Insights allows you to study user behavior patterns and trends in the publication of certain images.
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After that, Watson turns the primary data set, Big Data, into structured information that can already be used in further work.



In addition to the ability to recognize video and photos, service developers have improved the API for Text to Speech and Speech to Text, which will create Siri or Cortana-like applications for smartphones. In principle, this can be used for any speech interface, including third-party robots. By the way, not so long ago, Watson learned Japanese, and now teaches Arabic with the help of specialists from Abu Dhabi. The system dictionary also includes Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

A little earlier, IBM announced IBM Watson Tone Analyzer , a service that helps determine the emotional tone of a text message. The service uses the principle of linguistic analysis, similar to the principle of IBM Watson Personality Insights. Tone Analyzer analyzes the provided text and gives an assessment of the emotional and social content reflected in the text. All this can be used to assess personal correspondence, as well as for marketing research, public relations and an automated communication center.



Another new service has been introduced - Dialogu, which allows the user to have a conversation with the application. For example, if necessary, you can ask to reset the password.

In order not to get confused among the variety of services from Watson, as well as to give developers a tool for combining various services of a cognitive system, IBM created a new set of tools - Watson Knowledge Studio .

By the way, in many cases the goal of Watson is not to replace a person, but to improve the decision-making process due to the availability of additional information in various fields. This may be an analysis of the situation with the impact of the hurricane on the industry of a particular locality or the identification of opportunities to optimize the production process of any company. The system considers millions of factors, reveals the connections between them and offers certain solutions, testing them many times (using the appropriate models) and evaluating them as a percentage.