Watson Workspace Obituary  

By Paul Withers | 3/4/19 7:23 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

This week marks the passing of Watson Workspace, one of the few major innovations in the ICS space of the last decade. I say that because it was innovative not only in technology, but openness, open technologies adopted and showcased, design thinking approach, integration and most importantly user experience. It may be gone for good, but for me it did a lot of good.

Introducing Blue Cloud Mirror, a Fun IBM Cloud Showcase  

By Niklas Heidloff | 1/23/19 11:15 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Blue Cloud Mirror is a game where players need to show five specific emotions and do five specific poses in two levels. The faster, the better. Play the game. It only takes a minute. All you need is a webcam and a Chrome browser.

Chatbots and Watson Assistant: Understanding The Moving Parts  

By Paul Withers | 5/29/18 4:09 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Over the past few months I’ve been digging more and more into Watson Assistant, formerly Watson Conversation. I’ve also been active in the Slack channels around Watson and Watson Assistant. I’ve become very conscious of a continuing theme around the product, based on a fundamental misunderstanding.

IBM Think 2018 Highlights for Developers  

By Niklas Heidloff | 3/23/18 10:17 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Last week IBM hosted the Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas which is IBM’s flagship conference that combines previous conferences like InterConnect and World of Watson. Below is a list of announcements and news that I, as a developer, like most.

Low-code Video Demo of Agilit-e, IBM Watson Workspace/Conversation and Node-RED in action  

By John Jardin | 12/13/17 10:26 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

This is a video demonstration of how a bot was created using a low-code strategy to integrate IBM Watson Workspace with IBM Watson Conversation using Node-RED & Agilit-e as the middleware. Bringing these tools together truly shows off the power of cloud services and integration.

Watson Developer Cloud Java SDK XPages Library  

By Paul Withers | 12/1/17 7:34 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Recently I’ve been digging into the Watson Conversation APIs. With Java being my language of choice, the natural starting point was the Watson Brewery demo which integrates with Watson Workspace. This in itself was a learning experience as I finally stepped beyond the world of Eclipse to use IntellJ IDEA, as mentioned in the ReadMe.

Creating Alexa Skills with OpenWhisk and IBM Watson  

By Niklas Heidloff | 11/16/17 3:43 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

My first code pattern (formerly known as developer journeys) has been published on developer.ibm.com/code. The pattern describes how to build Alexa skills with OpenWhisk. Rather than using intent and entity identification from Alexa, Watson Conversation is used. This allows developers to define conversation flows declaratively and developers can reuse conversations that are available in the Bot Asset Exchange.

Insights into Machine Learning at Jazoon  

By Andrew Magerman | 11/3/17 1:41 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Jazoon is a tech conference in Zürich which manages to bring brilliant speakers to talk about a particular subject - on Friday, 27th October 2017 it was Artificial Intelligence. [...] One of the surprises for me was to learn that essentially, most of the artificial intelligence/Machine learning software is open source.

How to write your own Slack Chatbots in Javascript  

By Niklas Heidloff | 10/16/17 12:11 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Last week Ansgar Schmidt and I gave a session at Codemotion How to write your own Slack Chatbots in Javascript. Below are the slides with screenshots of our demos. We demonstrated how to write a Node.js application that uses Botkit to connect with Slack and that uses IBM Watson Conversation as natural language processing service.

Build with Watson tips: Best practices for using custom classifiers in Watson Visual Recognition  

By IBM developerWorks | 10/11/17 5:38 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

The IBM Watson Visual Recognition API is a powerful cognitive tool that identifies image content. The API comes with pretrained models that can accurately detect objects, faces, scenes, colors, and foods, which can facilitate fast adoption and implementation. But the real power comes from the ability to train Watson to recognize custom classes.

Node-RED Samples for IBM Watson IoT Hackathon  

By Niklas Heidloff | 9/11/17 7:31 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Recently I gave an one hour webinar to help developers to prepare for a hackathon related to IBM Watson IoT. I demonstrated Node-RED and coded live some sample flows.

I have no confidence in entities  

By Simon ODoherty | 9/11/17 7:12 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

I have something I need to confess. I have a personal hatred of Entities. At least in their current form. There is a difference between deterministic and probabilisitic programming, that a lot of developers new to Watson find it hard to switch to. Entities bring them back to that warm place of normal development.

My MWLUG presentation: Elementary!  

By Karl-Henry Martinsson | 8/9/17 10:33 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Yesterday I presented at MWLUG, and I want to share my presentation with both the ones attending and anyone who was not able to be there. I am posting two version, one with just the slides, and one with speaker notes, where I tried to capture the content, if not the exact verbiage of the session. I hope to be able to post the demo database with the code later this week or early next week.

Introducing the Conversation Inspector for IBM Watson  

By Niklas Heidloff | 7/31/17 9:01 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

My colleague Ansgar Schmidt and I have developed a new tool for developers to simplify building conversational user experiences with IBM Watson Conversation. The tool displays JSON data of REST API requests that is sent between applications and the Watson Conversation service and it allows developers to modify outgoing JSON messages.

IoT The Next Big Thing For Application Development?  

By Red Pill Now | 5/4/17 2:59 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

I consider myself fortunate that my career has coincided with the rise of the computer as a business tool. Over that time I have seen a series of break-out technologies that have significantly changed the way computers have not only solved business needs but also transformed that way businesses can work.

Tone Analyzer for Customer Engagement: 7 new tones to help you understand how your customers are feeling  

By IBM Bluemix | 4/25/17 5:17 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new Tone Analyzer endpoint trained for Customer Engagement scenarios. The new endpoint was trained on customer support conversations on twitter, and the tones included are frustrated, sad, satisfied, excited, polite, impolite and sympathetic.

I love Pandas!  

By Simon ODoherty | 4/19/17 2:54 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

You can now download your logs from your conversation workspace into a JSON format. So I thought I’d take this moment to introduce Pandas. Some people love the “Improve” UI, but personally I like being able to easily mold the data to what I need.

Understanding Natural Language Text via IBM Watson  

By Niklas Heidloff | 4/5/17 12:39 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

One of the newer IBM Watson offerings that I really like is Watson Knowledge Studio. It basically allows identifying information in unstructured data. Below is a quick overview of the Knowledge Studio functionality.

Using IBM Watson Discovery to query Unstructured Data  

By Niklas Heidloff | 4/5/17 12:15 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

In my previous blog entry I described how to use Watson Knowledge Studio to create models to identify information in unstructured data. These models can be used by the Watson services and offerings Watson Discovery, Watson Explorer and Watson Natural Language Understanding. Below is a quick intro how to use Watson Discovery to query unstructured data.