Getting Started with IBM Watson
I have been writing code for a number of years now, but was finally bitten by the AI bug in 2016. A thrill of excitement ran through me as I ran demos of applications that were powered by AI. Seeing the potential and value of how AI could change our lives, I was convinced that AI was the future, only to find out later that I was wrong. AI had been a part of my life all along. It had worn several clothes like People You May Know on Facebook, autocorrect while I typed on my phone, Siri, and so many others.
When I learned about IBM Watson APIs, I was very excited at the fact that I could also build smarter applications and be a part of the AI game (well, kinda). I could now build applications that ran on steroids. I could develop smarter, richer applications, leveraging the capability of AI without having to know the intricacies of how machine learning code and systems are built.
Since then, I have played around with some of the APIs, and I’m willing to share some of what I’ve learnt along the way.
IBM Watson APIs are accessible on the IBM Cloud (formerly Bluemix) platform. You can learn more about the IBM Cloud platform and its suite of services here: https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/ , http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/definition/IBM-Bluemix and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_cloud_computing.
There are several IBM Watson API available on the IBM Cloud:
- Personality Insights
- Tone Analyzer
- Watson Assistant (formerly Conversation)
- Text to Speech
- Speech to Text
- Natural Language Classifier
- Natural Language Understanding
- Tone Analyzer
- Machine Learning
- Watson Discovery
- Visual Recognition
- Langage Translator
- IoT Platform
- Knowledge Studio
- Knowledge Catalog
The are also language SDKs for IBM Watson:
To get started with using IBM Watson, you have to first sign up for an IBM Cloud account.
After you have completed the process, you will be redirected to the catalog page, where you’ll find all the services that you can access on IBM Cloud. On the left sidebar, scroll to the Watson section, click on “Watson” and then you’ll find a list of all the Watson APIs you can leverage to build your application.
To access any service, select it and create an instance of that service in your account.
After the service has been successfully created, you’ll be redirected to the landing page of that service. Click on the Service Credentials option on the left sidebar, click on New Credential and click Add. Congratulations, you are now ready to use that service in any application you want to build. You can read through the documentation to learn more about the service.
This is the first step to using any IBM Watson service. I hope this tutorial was helpful. I’ll be working on some basic applications in subsequent posts, so get ready for an interesting ride!
Our first project will use the Tone Analyzer service.
Thank you.
