Hey Tony,

As you know, Watson is the platform that successfully won (by a large margin) the jeopardy competition by analyzing questions for content and providing answers based on this content. It is a huge step forward in AI. I have been waiting for this to be released to general developers for things outside of the medical field. Other companies are also in the mix like google and amazon, but I believe IBM is king of this castle right now. The fact that they have released some of their capabilities for general development is awesome.

I haven't been watching these developments for the past couple of months. Previous to that, everything that I have tried to research about using services provided by these companies has been a bit disappointing, but there was always a promise of big things to come. It looks like IBM is the first out of the gate with this, which is good. It also makes the need for DNS dictation capabilities all the more important.

While IBM Watson can translate recordings, I do believe that providing converted text to Watson will provide faster results as the speech to text would have already been completed on the client end. [EDIT] Adding more information - Text is very small and can be transferred over the internet faster, and the processing wouldn't need to take place on the server farm hosting Watson. It would also reduce the cost as you wouldn't first be charged for transcribing the test.[/EDIT] Dictation also provides much more natural interaction with the end users.

The powerful thing is that Watson is able to take this type of text and do a really good job of determining the context and content of the dictated text. This would allow for very natural conversation to take place using their API. Watson is continually learning from this text and as more applications are developed, Watson becomes better. For example, Watson may not know about EZ-Robot. If something were developed for EZ-Robot using this platform, Watson would learn what EZ-Robot is, who DJ is, who the community is, who the members of the community are, what ARC is, what components inside of ARC are and what they do, what third party apps are available and so on because these would be topics that would be discussed by the people using this service through EZ-Robot. How cool would it be to ask your robot something like "Does EZ-Robot's Richard R enjoy Beer?" and it respond based on its past data about Richard R from EZ-Robot? This completely changes the types of things that we can do with AI when access to this piece of Watson becomes available.

The things that have been released so far are really cool. For example, this would allow you robot to translate some languages to and from English. That is an amazing feature.

I need to get some time to use the services and test them out, but these are things that I see would take EZ-Robot or any other robot platform or smart phone provider to a totally new level. There will be jokes about "Remember Siri and how frustrating it was?"

The only downfall that I see for me personally is that there are charges associated with using this service. It makes me have to make a decision as far as how to model EZ-AI. The same holds true for DJ and ARC. Some way would have to be written to track what has been requested of this service and a billing system established to track these things. Where do you store this information? I don't think that locally on someone's machine is a good idea from a business perspective. If a child decided to play with dad's robot and use this feature for a few hours, how much does dad get charged? Do you need a monthly billing flat rate for all people who sign up to use something developed to use this?

I will definitely be investigating the use of this after a crazy weekend that I have ahead. I will definitely be looking at it for myself if nothing else, but am very interested in developing something that could be used by EZ-AI or else where.

Dang Tony, you sure know how to get me thinking, and I thank you for that. We will be chatting as I know you have an interest in this for sure.

**I went back and edited this to clean up some of the text. I was really excited when I first wrote it and repeated myself a couple of times. I also added some text to clarify one of my statements.

David, we are on the verge of having some very exciting things that we will soon be able to integrate into our robots and with true innovators like DJ who continues to evolve/improve his great product, the sky is the limit for us.

Exciting times!

Tony

Indeed. I have looked at what they have put out for use and the API a little bit. Very cool way of doing things IMHO. Hang onto your seats kids. The ride is about to get very exciting.

IBM Watson certainly looks the business. And like you guys have already said... very exciting times ahead for us all indeed.

Is it a language service? Or will it do any AI? From what I read on their website just now, it appears to be a language service.

Hey DJ, they are releasing one part at a time to developers. Scroll down just a bit on this site for the things that are on their way.

Watson developer apis

Some of these API's are for specific industries like medical right now. I think it was wise for them to focus on a couple of specific industries to make sure things are working there well before opening it up to a much larger group.

The thing that really interests me is that Jeopardy questions are intentionally asked in an esoteric manner that takes a lot of "thought" to decipher. I have attached a short video on how Watson did. It was really amazing to see that it was able to take the spoken text, go through the internet to decode that text, and then find the meaning of that text, search for the correct answer based on the meaning of that text, and return the data in the form of a question (which isn't natural), then speak that text before people could derive the correct answer. It was impressive to watch the match. This was 5 years ago. The two guys in the video were past champions of the show. The guy on the left had won something like 74 matches without a loss. I am not sure about the guy on the right.

This is what makes the EZ-Robot platform so dang powerful. For those who have wondered why EZ-Robot runs its commands on a PC that is tethered to the EZ-B over wifi, this is why. Adding API's that run on a PC to do truly amazing things allows the robot to have far more capabilities than anything that is running off of a controller on a robot.