Shall we say “Watson for the rest of us”? With the launch of their cloud services IBM propose a set of services defined as Watson. In 2011 the famous AI or more exactly cognitive-data system won the American television game Jeopardy as proof of concept of its ability. Watson is now said to be available for small to middle business as SAAS promoting also the new IBM cloud platform Bluemix. However Watson will not be able to reply to your custom Jeopardy as it is not exactly sold as “out of the box”. Instead you will find a set of 13 services including the machine learning oriented API “Alchemy” plus 3 third party service and growing. On the model of Amazon AWS any company can bring its own service on the top of Watson in the IBM market place.

^{© IBM}

Building up a complex Watson based cognitive web-apps in Bluemix may rise several challenge. First of all the response latency due to the nature of the cognitive process and data communication delay. Application relies on a REST API where it may be tempting to pipe the process. It is not obvious that IBM has options about this but at the time of this writing all back end code have to implement networked communication between Bluemix services.

Our Visual Recognition Watson application demo:
http://visual-recognition-nodejs-jml0.mybluemix.net/