Featured Hack: Mobile Image Recognition with Watson Visual Recognition & Twilio

One of the easiest ways to get started with Watson Visual Recognition is through general tagging, a feature that enables users to quickly understand the contents of images through lists of returned tags. With a vocabulary exceeding 22,000 terms, general tagging is capable of discerning objects, actions, scenes, and colors across a variety of industries and domains. We’ve seen users harness general tagging to perform metadata enrichment of video streams, inspections with drones, and social media analytics.

Thanks to hacker extraordinaire Layne Miao, you can now try out general tagging for yourself on your phone!

Simply text an image to +1 (415) 964-2239 to see your image recognition results. Watson will return general tagging results, the most prominent colors, and whether the image contains content that may be unsuitable for work (via emoji).

Miao was able to create this project by combining Watson Visual Recognition with Twilio’s Messaging API, a service that enables users to send and receive SMS messages. When an image is texted to the number above, it passes through Watson Visual Recognition to be analyzed for visual content, and the resulting tags, colors, and confidence scores and sent back to the user via SMS.

We’ve seen Watson used for field tech work and even hair salon appointments. Let us know any fun Watson projects you’ve put together in the comments below - we may feature you in our future posts!

You can find more details on the project’s Github repository and get started with both of the API services used in this project through IBM Cloud.