IBM makes Watson available via API

IBM didn’t have to flaunt its debatable cloud dominance over Amazon Web Services on the sides of public buses if it wanted to upstage the cloud kingpin at its user conference this week — Big Blue could have just led with the news that its famous, Jeopardy!-champ-destroying Watson system is now available as a cloud service.
That’s right: Developers who want to incorporate Watson’s ability to understand natural language and provide answers need only have their applications make a REST API call to IBM’s new Watson Developers Cloud. “It doesn’t require that you understand anything about machine learning other than the need to provide training data,” Rob High, IBM’s CTO for Watson, said in a recent interview about the new platform.
More on the the details later, but first the big picture. If IBM actually delivers a workable cloud platform around Watson and developers actually take advantage of it to build new, smart applications, it will be a big fricking deal.

The real beauty of these types of systems is not just in the intelligence of the computers, but also in how they affect the thought processes of people using them, High said. He noted an early Watson user who learned pretty quickly after using Watson that he had been asking the wrong questions of his data all along.
“When you get a very rapid response to our questions, we drive our level of concentration much more deeply,” High explained. “And in concentrating more deeply, we think about things we haven’t thought of before.”

Aside from the computing resources to analyze users’ data and then compute answers when API calls come in, the Watson Developers Cloud also includes an SDK, an app store, a data marketplace (the more data Watson has, the more it can learn) and IBM experts to assist in everything from design to beta testing (for the time being, these services are where the company expects to make money, High acknowledged). Watson will return results of queries along with a confidence score and links to data that weighed heavily on its answer.
All the help is necessary because even though the APIs are designed to be simple, the idea of using something like Watson to power an intelligent app can be daunting — like coming to terms with the fact that a cognitive computing application isn’t programmed as much as it learns and adapts from the data its creator provides.
According to High, “All the things software developers have learned about programming a computer sort of go out the door.”
 Source : Gigaom