Building Cognitive Applications with IBM Watson Services: Volume 1 Getting Started

Abstract

The Building Cognitive Applications with IBM Watson Services series is a seven-volume collection that introduces IBM® Watson™ cognitive computing services. The series includes an overview of specific IBM Watson® services with their associated architectures and simple code examples. Each volume describes how you can use and implement these services in your applications through practical use cases.

The series includes the following volumes:

• Volume 1 Getting Started, SG24-8387
  
• Volume 2 Conversation, SG24-8394
  
• Volume 3 Visual Recognition, SG24-8393
  
• Volume 4 Natural Language Classifier, SG24-8391
  
• Volume 5 Language Translator, SG24-8392
  
• Volume 6 Speech to Text and Text to Speech, SG24-8388
  
• Volume 7 Natural Language Understanding, SG24-8398
  

Whether you are a beginner or an experienced developer, this collection provides the information you need to start your research on Watson services. If your goal is to become more familiar with Watson in relation to your current environment, or if you are evaluating cognitive computing, this collection can serve as a powerful learning tool.

This IBM Redbooks® publication, Volume 1, introduces cognitive computing, its motivating factors, history, and basic concepts. This volume describes the industry landscape for cognitive computing and introduces Watson, the cognitive computing offering from IBM. It also describes the nature of the question-answering (QA) challenge that is represented by the Jeopardy! quiz game and it provides a high-level overview of the QA system architecture (DeepQA), developed for Watson to play the game. This volume charts the evolution of the Watson Developer Cloud, from the initial DeepQA implementation. This book also introduces the concept of domain adaptation and the processes that must be followed to adapt the various Watson services to specific domains.