
IBM Watson API - miket
https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis/examples-qapi/1207-2/
======
pesenti
IBM is about to make these APIs (and many others) much more accessible as part
of BlueMix ([https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/](https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/) \- the
IBM PaaS/Heroku). I lead the team in charge of developing the Watson platform.
Ask me questions!

~~~
logicalman
Is BlueMix a Heroku competitor or compliment? I want to develop on the Watson
API but I also want to use a stack I'm familiar with. Also, do you have range
estimates for the price of accessing the Watson API?

~~~
matznerd
I went for an info session and a few events for Watson a couple of months ago
at the IBM office in NYC. They are doing pricing with revenue shares. A lot of
devs, including myself, were not happy about this. They basically were not
open to projects that weren't directly making money off of Watson...

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mooreds
If you want access to the API, you have to fill out a form, here:
[http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosys...](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/form_ecosystem.html?cmp=usbrb&cm=s&csr=watson.site_20140319&cr=deveco&ct=usbrb301&cn=sec3partnerapp)

This is buried in the docs as a comment on this page:
[https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-
apis...](https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-
apis/application-development-flow/)

Edit:

No real support for 'playing around' with the API. Bummer.

Edit2:

Just went through the application process linked above. Be prepared to give
info about yourself and your company and an explanation of why you want access
to the Watson API, as well as what type of information you'll be working with.
I stated 'just want to play around with the API'. We'll see how they react to
that.

~~~
pesenti
Watson APIs will be accessible - without the need for an application - as part
of BlueMix ([https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/](https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/) \- the
IBM PaaS/Heroku) in a couple of weeks. Stay posted!

~~~
Ixiaus
BlueMix is actually pretty exciting to me; I think IBM has finally stepped up
as a competitor in the "cloud" ecosystem where Microsoft has really failed.

~~~
thinkpad20
"Really failed"? According to Forbes in July of this year[0], Microsoft is
second only to Amazon in the cloud market, and gaining. I'm not sure how that
counts as a failure, except in the sense that Microsoft makes a popular
whipping boy.

[0]
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/28/amazon-i...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2014/07/28/amazon-
is-facing-a-cloud-crisis-as-microsoft-muscles-in/)

~~~
bkeroack
I suspect (but don't have confirmation) that this includes Microsoft's SaaS
products like Exchange Online/O365, which are _very_ successful.

I get the impression that Azure specifically as PaaS/IaaS, OTOH, is quite a
bit less so. At least compared to AWS.

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readerrrr
Out of curiosity I googled the same request.

[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22His+1983+h...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22His+1983+hit+\\%22Beat+it\\%22+featured+Eddie+Van+Halen+on+guitar.%22#safe=off&hl=en&q=His+1983+%22Beat+it%22+featured+Eddie+Van+Halen+on+guitar).

I think this might be useful if Watson was being feed with a medical database.
Otherwise I don't see any need for it; is there any?

edit: Watson as a legal consultant would be great. There might be a product in
that, not as an replacement for a lawyer but more as guide/search tool.

~~~
tluyben2
I would think Watson can replace most lawyers (and MDs, and ...) of this
world. Most of them don't think and just rehash stuff they learnt, just like
Watson does. Sure for the exceptions you need actual people, but that is the
same time when you would go from your corner lawyer to a more prominent one
and when your doctor would forward you to an expert anyway.

~~~
jpwagner
Conversation you will never hear in a Dr. office:

    
    
      me: i have pain in my side
      dr: 25%: something you ate 22%: appendicitis, 18%: kidney stone...
    

Conversation you will never hear in a lawyer's office:

    
    
      me: am i allowed to...
      lawyer: 42%: Maybe, 38%: Yes, 20%: No

~~~
yzmtf2008
This is only true when there isn't enough information supplied. You can't
expect the doctor to figure out what the problem is just by telling the doctor
you have a pain in your side, same goes for the lawyer's scenario.

~~~
jpwagner
Did you consider that that's not the point I'm making?

The confidences here provide misinformation. This is more harmful than no
information.

~~~
luxbock
How is it misinformation? The human doctor would not tell us his diagnosis in
terms of percentages, because we as humans have a hard time grasping
probabilities intuitively. That doesn't mean that a probabilistic diagnosis
would not be more accurate.

The doctors job is to provide me with as much information about the objective
criteria of my physical condition as possible. However when it comes to making
choices about my treatment, say in the case of accepting/rejecting an
experimental drug with some potentially nasty side effects, it should be
entirely my own value judgement on what to do with said information.

------
malanj
Has anyone at HN used either IBM Watson or Wolfram Alpha to build a real
(commercial) app? It feels like there should be a whole wave of apps built on
either of these technologies but it doesn't seem to be materialising.

What is holding back the killer apps for answer/computation engines?

~~~
aabajian
Google / Wolfram Alpha / Watson are great at answering broad questions.

1\. "Who was the 12th president?" \- Zachary Taylor 2\. "What color wine is
cabernet sauvignon?" \- Red 3\. "Is a ferret a rodent?" \- The ferret is the
domesticated member of the Order Carnivora, Family Mustelidae and Genus
Mustela. A common misconception is that ferrets are rodents.

The real challenge is answering niche questions:

1\. What size are the OEM rear wheels of a Honda S2000? 2\. How can I fix
MySQL error 1064? 3\. How do I remove wine from a macbook?

These types of questions aren't answerable by a simple mining of Wikipedia or
Encyclopedic knowledge. They represent niches within our society (S2000
owners, programmers, people who spilled wine on their macbooks). Google
provides excellent links to pages that contain answers to these questions, but
it cannot deduce a single answer or common response. This is why sites like
Answers.com, Yahoo! Answers, StackExchange, etc. can flourish, but it's also
why an NLP question and answer system is very difficult.

I've been working on a system to mine existing responses to questions -
[http://gotoanswer.stanford.edu](http://gotoanswer.stanford.edu) \- I only
have a small subset of programming-related questions (~10M), but you can get
an idea for what I'm trying to do by searching for "How do I remove wine from
a macbook?" You'll see that there are results for removing wine the liquid and
WINE the windows non-emulator.

~~~
Rooster61
You bring up a good point, but it seems as if Watson was designed with this in
mind. If you notice in the JSON response, it lists this query as a factoid
class.

It may handle different queries with different attributes differently, such as
focusing on certain portions of its corpus or changing what aspects of its
search results are more heavily weighed.

A query identified as a factoid might be researched and judged very
differently than something a bit more nebulous, such as a comparison, or
something with more specificity like the examples you listed.

Admittedly, I am basing quite a bit off of one example response given in their
documentation, but it is an intriguing clue as to how Watson will handle that
aspect of understanding which info to discern.

~~~
finin
Factoid is a word coined by Norman Mailer for "an item of unreliable
information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact".
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid)

~~~
nl
In QA literature it is often used in the "unverified fact" sense (which is
also mentioned in Wikipedia article).

The Wikipedia article says it well:

 _A factoid is a questionable or spurious (unverified, false, or fabricated)
statement presented as a fact, but without supporting evidence, although the
term can have conflicting meanings._

------
mark_l_watson
I am helping a customer integrate Watson into their system so I am very happy
to see the news about BlueMix
([https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/](https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/)) that apparently
will allow me to keep experimenting with Watson after my consulting engagement
is complete.

If you read the documentation, you will see that preparing training data and
questions is fairly straightforward.

------
ilaksh
So you just ask it any random question and it knows everything? Or only things
that come up on Jeopardy?

I don't see an API for feeding it information.

~~~
MartynX
I would assume that they are working closer with companies that they trust to
feed in information. Having that on an what will eventually be a public API is
recipe for disaster.

~~~
matznerd
Each instance of Watson is unique and has to be trained as such based on it's
"corpus" (set of data) and actual feedback on the quality of it's answers by
experts. The public API sounds like it will allow access to specific flavors
of pre-trained and data-filled Watsons, like the food- recipe one or some
basic medical ones.

------
mooreds
I found the link above to be a bit useless as it jumps right into getting
answers with evidence. Here's a better overview link:
[https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-
apis...](https://developer.ibm.com/watson/docs/developing-watson-apis/using-
question-answer-api-access-watson-capabilities/)

------
beebs93
I sent a e-mail to my co-workers containing "...natural English to ask
Watson..." and somehow people read it as "You can ask Emma Watson, who is
English, a question and she will respond".

And I thought, "...close enough - Watson could answer questions about Emma".

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Tyrant505
Does this also give access to their cooking and recipe data?

Edit:
[http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cognitivecooking/](http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/cognitivecooking/)

------
yatoomy
Ive been looking into Watson's new application to analytics etc. How would
that compare to say Mathimatica or the Wolfram Language/Data Science Platform?

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kyberias
Looking at that example, I wonder why that Porcaro quote is listed as
evidence. It doesn't relate to Jackson's album at all.

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Doublon
"Questions" in the documentation without question mark (?) seem somehow wrong
to me.

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80ProofPudding
Waiting for my coffee to brew, I read that as "Emma Watson API".

