Watson Work Services - Connect Review #4

I know it’s a bit late in the day but I have a couple more things I want to talk about post Connect and with preparations for Interconnect and trying to tie up work before I go away - well these got pushed back.

Watson Work Services, what is it?  WWS (not sure if anyone else is using that acronym but let’s go with it) is not a product, it’s a platform. It is designed to connect to Watson’s APIs and leverage those for language, search, and data. The results can then be fed back to your application and used to trigger actions.  If you’ve seen Watson Workspace (formerly known as “Toscana”) then you might know that it is underpinned by Watson Work Services.   I stole this screenshot from Marc Pagnier’s presentation which I think explains the role WWS is intended to play.

Screen Shot 2017-03-14 at 23.37.37

So why is this good news? Well most of us have heard of IBM’s Watson efforts and understand some of the things Watson can do but for the majority the idea of accessing Watson’s APIs or applying its intelligence to our data appeared out of reach. I mean it’s not like you’re going to install Watson on site.  WWS gives any size company or even single developer access to those Watson APIs without installing anything on site and without investing a lot of money.  In fact WWS works within Bluemix and so your application, whether on premises or in the cloud, can call a query to WWS to feed it data and get results back you can then store and act on.  The cost is calculated in pennies each time you run a WWS query so , as an application designer, that is entirely within your control.   With that model you can easily and quickly experiment with integrating cognitive logic and intelligent behaviour into your applications.

To get started with WWS go to https://developer.watsonwork.ibm.com and to access example applications visit http://github.com/watsonwork . To stimulate  your creative brain here’s another screenshot I stole that shows some of Watson’s APIs and you can find out more about what they can do here Screen Shot 2017-03-14 at 23.53.36

For a start we already have several ideas for our customers who generate a lot of data and would benefit from integrating  intelligent analysis and action triggers into their applications.