The epicenter of IBM Watson’s developer support efforts (as well as the headquarters for its Watson-based Commerce efforts) is moving to San Francisco (just a few blocks from Opus Research’s headquarters). IBM has booked a couple of floors in a building called Foundry III in a South-0f-Market (SOMA) neighborhood that may as well be called Silicon Valley North. At a launch event that attracted hundreds of attendees – a mix of developers, partners, coders, customers and analysts – EVP and General Manager Mike Rhodin kicked off by providing background on the progress that has been made since the formation of the IBM Watson business unit in January 2014.

Back then, IBM opened the Watson HQ in Lower Manhattan and announced that its “instant ecosystem” already lured 750 applicants to take advantage of the cloud-based resources and APIs. Rhodin noted that, at the time there were fewer than 10 APIs for them to work with. Today, Rhodin noted, the ever-growing number of APIs stands at 28. As illustrated in this post, which refers to them as Watson Developer Cloud Services, the most recent additions to the roster reflect the organic demand for speech and natural language processing, conversation management, machine learning and deep analytics from application developers large and small.

Tops on the list is the “Natural Language Classifier.” This is core to recognizing the intent of an individual based on what they say, even though it may be totally imprecise. Rapid recognition of the purpose of a conversation is key to providing relevant responses. But rapid recognition and response is just the beginning. Other APIs can be invoked http://ww.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/tradeoff-analytics.htmland integrated into the conversation to make responses relevant, meaningful and insightful. Concept Insights is a great case-in-point. It is a resource that strongly differentiates IBM Watson’s handling of natural language queries from a simple keyword search.

By quickly identifying the concepts under investigation, rather than the words used, Concept Insights can look at a broad array of related documents or source material to provide an accurate response. A start-up called ROSS provides a great use case for incorporating Concept Insights into a valuable intelligent assistance service. Observing that 80% of people in need of legal advice really can’t afford good lawyers, the founder of ROSS established a way for people to use their own words to describe their information needs.

Alternative services require structured queries that assume some level of legal training from the information seeker. ROSS uses the power of IBM Watson to pore through relevant articles and return a small set of results. No need for a lawyer to put the long hours of literature search and review.

Another popular resource that differentiates IBM Watson from Intelligent Assistant platforms is Tradeoff Analytics API. As IBM’s collateral explains, it “helps people make decisions when balancing multiple objectives”. In his introductory remarks, Mike Rhodin said that the company used Watson’s Tradeoff Analytics to help it choose the South of Market site for WatsonWest. Because it is just afew blocks from Opus Research’s Global HQ, we think Watson led to making an excellent choice.

Bottom line: Today’s event showed that Watson is gaining significant momentum at the grassroots level. Rhodin noted that there are over 350 Watson-infused start-ups in 85 countries. It is part of what he refers to as the “3rd technology revolution,” a phenomenon that is taking place because companies and individuals generate information at a rate that is much more than mere mortals can assimilate and use. The adoption of Intelligent Assistance across multiple categories of enterprise verticals is accelerating for much the same reason. We turn computer services because, frankly, we can’t keep up without computer-assistance. Now the resources exist to let us use our own words to explain what we need and to get results.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language, Cloud Services, IBM Watson, Intelligent Assistance