This article was published on February 22, 2016

IBM’s Watson has new APIs meant to gauge how you’re feeling (and which shoes you have on)


IBM’s Watson has new APIs meant to gauge how you’re feeling (and which shoes you have on)

Watson has a new set of APIs available for developers, and may be able to tell if you like them or not.

The three APIs — Tone Analyzer, Emotion Analysis and Visual Recognition — are in beta, and IBM is announcing its Text-to-speech engine also has emotional capabilities, and is being re-released as Expressive TTS.

Tone Analyzer will listen to how you speak, and scan your input for emotions like fear or joy. It’s also able to analyze entire sentences rather than single words, which IBM says will help with “nuanced understanding” of users’ input.

Emotion Analysis, on the other hand, helps users discover the emotion of people they’re communicating with. It uses much of the same analysis tools as Tone Analyzer, but turns the table so you can get a better read on people you’re interacting with.

Visual Recognition is situated for image analysis, but lets developers train it. Rather than simply identifying ‘shoes’ as some other image scanning services may, Visual Recognition will be able to tell which type of shoes they are, down to very specific stylistic identifiers.

These three new APIs (and the new Expressive TTS service) are all part of Watson’s open platform, and are available via the Watson Developer Cloud on Bluemix.

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