Top 5 Reasons to Switch from Watson Retrieve and Rank to Watson Discovery
Time is running out to switch from Watson Retrieve and Rank (R&R) and Watson Document Conversion Service (DCS). As previously announced, R&R and DCS have been deprecated and will no longer be available from October 3, 2018.
Watson Discovery is an advanced insight engine on the public cloud, enabling you to fulfill the same use cases as R&R and DCS and much more. Discovery can power conversational long-tail applications for customer support, voice of the customer analysis over call center transcripts, deep search over regulatory documents, and more. Discovery includes all the core features of DCS and R&R — including document conversion from PDF/Word/HTML, keyword and natural language search, and machine learned relevancy training. In addition, Discovery includes a host of new capabilities to provide a better developer and end user experience.
Why should you switch to Watson Discovery?
- One robust service combining both R&R and DCS
Core features of R&R and DCS are seamlessly integrated within Watson Discovery so that you can ingest data in multiple formats and perform advanced searches on the data. Discovery also now supports almost a dozen languages with additional support and is available for deployment at regional data centers around the world. Language support has been improved, as has been UI tooling for answer rating. Premium deployments for high security and performance requirements are supported as well.
2. Integrated NLP, custom domain models, and pre-enriched news
Discovery is powered by advanced NLP that automatically analyzes the text to extract metadata as you ingest content into the service. You can also use a custom annotation model built using Watson Knowledge Studio specific to your industry, further enhancing the richness of Discovery insights. For natural language queries, Discovery also enables Passage Retrieval, allowing you to go beyond the document results from R&R and display relevant sentences or passages from a longer document. Discovery also packages a pre-enriched collection of the latest news from around the world.
3. Simpler setup and configuration
No search engine expertise needed; no specific data formatting needed; and a single API call is all that’s needed for conversion, enrichment, and ingestion! You merely need to drag and drop files to kick off the ingestion process. The configuration for ingestion has also been simplified and can be managed directly through the tooling.
4. Training made simple
Training complexity has been reduced, thanks to automated model management and training monitoring. Far fewer steps than before are required to start surfacing relevant answers. Discovery provides APIs and tooling to store and manage your training, and automatically updates models when training changes. Relevancy is further augmented thanks to built in document splitting to deal with longer documents, and query expansion to handle synonyms and domain terms.
5. Scale from Lite to Premium
Multiple service tiers make it easier to buy the exact amount of service you need — including a free tier below 2,000 documents. If you need more storage, Discovery can now accommodate up to 1 TB. Our pricing model has also been simplified to make it easier to anticipate costs. Learn more about our plans and pricing.
Making the switch
All told, Watson Discovery Services (WDS) is designed to address the same core use cases as the deprecated services, while bringing the latest in AI powered search and information retrieval to the market. The WDS user experience is simpler and faster, with an overall feature set more powerful than its precursors. That said, to make migrating your data from DCS and R&R to Discovery as easy as possible, we have assembled a few resources for you:
- Migration guide: Provides technical details on migration process
- developerWorks tutorial Part 1: Walks through steps for migrating data to WDS
- developerWorks tutorial Part 2: Walks through steps for migrating data directly from an R&R instance to WDS
Should you wish for assistance during migration, we invite you to engage our Expert Services team. Alternatively, don’t hesitate to use our developerWorks forum to post questions. We thank you for your use of DCS and/or R&R, and hope you take advantage of the fantastic resources that WDS has to offer.
