IBM continues to push the development of Watson, the firm’s deep learning artificial intelligence supercomputer.
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Through the new regional center, IBM is hoping to spark more creativity and industry-specific apps that could bring more awareness to and expand use cases for Watson’s machine learning power.
IBM Watson Visual Insights allows developers to build apps that reveal insights from social media images and video.
Watson’s speech capabilities have also been improved with new tools that allow devs to create apps in multiple languages, including Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.
The tools are designed to make it easy to embed Watson APIs in any form factor from mobile devices, cloud services, and connected systems.
Watson’s impressive success is illustrated further by a new Watson location in San Francisco that will serve as the global headquarters for IBM Commerce, one of the fastest growing products in the Watson portfolio.
“Watson wasn’t actually a single computer but rather a collection of technologies that worked together to crunch data and solve problems”, Lee points out – and it wasn’t really ready for widespread commercial use when it had its star turn with Alex Trebak.
According to the company, these new APIs will help its customers build advanced text, speech and image recognition capabilities into their software and systems.
In September IBM opened a new Watson Health business centre in the Boston area to target the health sector and pharmaceutical industry. Using the cognitive power of IBM Watson language APIs, iDAvatars provides patients with an engaging and interactive user experience to help them assess, track and control their illnesses through changes in diet, exercise, compliance with medical regimen, and compassionate and encouraging social support.
Meanwhile, the company opened a Watson Hub in San Francisco aimed at collaborating with local and Silicon Valley companies.
Famous for its win on the television quiz program “Jeopardy” four years ago, Watson has undergone considerable evolvement.
IBM also announced what it calls Visual Insights. On September 14, it announced the appointment of Harriet Green, the former CEO of Thomas Cook Group, to head up two newly created business units that will apply big data, analytics and cognitive computing capabilities to the Internet of Things (IoT) and education market. Watson continuously learns, gaining in value and knowledge over time, from previous interactions.
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