14 IBM Watson and Cognitive Computing

Objectives

In this chapter you’ll:

  • Learn Watson’s range of services and use their Lite tier to become familiar with them at no charge.

  • Try lots of demos of Watson services.

  • Understand what cognitive computing is and how you can incorporate it into your applications.

  • Register for an IBM Cloud account and get credentials to use various services.

  • Install the Watson Developer Cloud Python SDK to interact with Watson services.

  • Develop a traveler’s companion language translator app by using Python to weave together a mashup of the Watson Speech to Text, Language Translator and Text to Speech services.

  • Learn about the Watson Analytics platform’s automated data preparation, predictive modeling and visualization capabilities.

  • Check out additional resources, such as IBM Watson Redbooks that will help you jump start your custom Watson application development.