IBM Expands AI Software Portfolio Adds NLP Capabilities

Highlights –

• With the release of the new services, customers can now access the same AI libraries that IBM uses to power its own IBM Watson products.
• According to IBM, a handful of early adopters have already tested out its new AI libraries and found several benefits.

IBM Corp. announced the launch of three new libraries within its embeddable Artificial Intelligence (AI) software portfolio with an aim to democratize some of the powerful AI capabilities it has created over the years.

With the release of the new services, customers can now access the same AI libraries that IBM uses to power its own IBM Watson products. In other words, they save developers the time and resources necessary to do it independently by allowing them to build highly advanced AI capabilities directly in their apps. With IBM’s embeddable libraries, developers now have a plug-and-play alternative to the time-consuming and complex process of training AI models that are often required.

The new libraries on offer include the IBM Watson Natural Language Processing Library, which can be used to build apps that analyze spoken human language to extract meaning and context from purpose and sentiment. Meanwhile, the IBM Watson Speech to Text Library, according to IBM, enables apps to transcribe human speech reliably and quickly. In contrast, the IBM Watson Text-to-Speech Library helps apps to translate written text into natural-sounding audio.

Each of the libraries, according to IBM, was painstakingly created by its teams within IBM Research and is intended to give programmers a simple and scalable way to incorporate AI into applications operating on any cloud platform. According to the company, they were created using a few open-source software components.

According to IBM Ecosystem General Manager Kate Woolley, “Enterprises must commit to a significant investment in expertise, resources, and time required to build, deploy, and manage AI-powered solutions. By bringing to market the same portfolio of embeddable AI technology that powers our industry-leading IBM Watson products, we are helping Ecosystem partners more efficiently deliver AI experiences that can drive business value for their clients.”

The inclusion of the three libraries will significantly expand IBM’s current portfolio of embeddable AI technologies, which already include IBM Maximo Visual Inspection, IBM Watson Assistant, IBM Watson Instana Observability, IBM Watson Discovery, and IBM Watson APIs.

According to Constellation Research Inc.’s Holger Mueller, speech recognition is a crucial feature that many next-generation applications require because it significantly improves the user experience. Mueller explained, “Speech works because humans can talk faster than they can type, so any app that has speech recognition has a leg up on its text-based cousins. So, it’s good to see more options to enable this speech-based UX coming to developers from IBM with the libraries that were previously used within Watson. More options and more competitors are a good thing for all speech-enabled apps.”

According to IBM, a handful of early adopters have already tested out its new AI libraries and found several benefits. One of these is the database business SingleStore Inc., which incorporates sentiment analysis into its offering using IBM Watson Natural Language Processing. According to Yatharth Gupta, Senior Vice President of Products at SingleStore, “Helping our clients integrate and use capabilities such as sentiment analysis will be invaluable in driving real-time analytics to help them better understand, engage, and serve their customers.”