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Cognitive Computing with IBM Watson
Cognitive Computing with IBM Watson

Cognitive Computing with IBM Watson: Build smart applications using artificial intelligence as a service

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Profile Icon Robert High Profile Icon Tanmay Bakshi
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Arrow left icon
Profile Icon Robert High Profile Icon Tanmay Bakshi
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€29.99
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Paperback Apr 2019 256 pages 1st Edition
eBook
€15.99 €23.99
Paperback
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Cognitive Computing with IBM Watson

Can Machines Converse Like Humans?

We are exposed to a wide range of chatbots in our everyday activities—Siri, Alexa, and Google Home are just a few examples. I can speak out loud to various devices with utterances, such as, Siri, what is the weather in Seattle? or Alexa, Turn on the lights, or Google, What is the tallest mountain in the world? And these devices just respond with answers or actions.

What they do is fairly remarkable in that there are many ways of inquiring about the weather. For example, I might say, What is the weather in Washington?, Tell me the temperature in Seattle, or even the more ambiguous, What is it like up North? All of these have essentially the same intent and are generally referring to the same location. For the most part, all of these devices are doing the same thing: using machine learning algorithms to classify your intention, and...

Creating a conversational agent workspace

Like nearly all of the Watson-branded offerings, the Watson Assistant is an application programming interface (API) hosted in the IBM Cloud. You learned how to create an account in the IBM Cloud in Chapter 1, Background, Transition, and the Future of Computing. We'll pick up from there by guiding you through the creation of an instance of the Watson Assistant servicereferred to as a workspace—in which you will customize and train the service to your conversational context.

Creating an instance of Watson Assistant and a workspace

To get started, we need to create a workspace that Watson can work with:

  1. After creating an account, go to the IBM Cloud services...

Creating a set of conversational intents

The first thing we need to do is identify the set of intents we want to support in this conversational agent. An intent is just an action that the end user may express, and that we want the application to support. Identifying the set of intents is actually pretty straightforward and can be derived from virtually any existing banking web application. 

This is a pretty common example of a typical set of actions you can perform on a banking application:

Here is the list of banking services that you might find on the Web:

  • ACCOUNTS: Information on what accounts you have, and their balances, along with other information about the account
  • MESSAGES: Where you would receive any notifications from the bank
  • FUNDS TRANSFER: Enables you to move money between your own accounts
  • MEMBER TO MEMBER: Supports transferring money from your account to...

Identifying entities through annotators

Let's return to the first style of identifying an entity that you care about. In the first approach, we showed you in Recognizing entities, we went to the intent examples, and highlighted the entity that we cared about in that example. We refer to this as the annotator approach to entity recognition. Annotators are a much more powerful way of identifying the entities. Rather than setting a rule, such as the word hot is a temperature entity, the annotator approach builds a machine learning algorithm that takes in the context of the surrounding words in the sentence. In doing so, it calculates the probability that hot is referring to a temperature. In a sentence such as The water is hot, it makes sense to recognize hot as being a temperature. But in another sentence, such as The market is hot, it should be taken to be the relative...

Building a dialog

To make your application a little more interesting, you can preface the interaction with a little greeting, and some sort of acknowledgement. We'll do that now.

You can introduce a dialog by pressing the Dialog tab of the main workspace screen and press the Create button. This will begin with a very basic dialog flow already filled out for you—including what to say to get things going, and how to respond in the case the user utters something completely off-topic:

Press on the Welcome card and an edit screen will come up on the right. You can modify the text that Watson will respond with, for example, change it to Welcome to ABC Bank. What can I do for you?:

Now, let's provide an interesting response if the user wants to pay their power bill. Press the Add node button, and in the If bot recognizes: field enter #Pay-Bills, press the + sign to...

Programming your conversation application

So, now we're ready to start developing an application to make use of your trained Watson conversation. For this, we're going to use Python, and we're less concerned with the proper structuring of the application as a whole than with the structuring of your calls to the Watson Assistant services. However, before we begin, we need to get the Python SDK for Watson. If you don't already have Python installed, go to https://www.python.org/.

Once you have Python installed, you should be able to use the PIP tool to download and install the Watson SDK by issuing the following command in a terminal window:

pip install --upgrade ibm-watson

There are occasions where you may run into permission errors when you issue that command on Mac or Linux. If you do, type the following command:

sudo -H pip install --ignore-installed...

Emerging features

As we write this, IBM is developing some enhancements to the Watson Assistant service that will be available by the time this book is published. These include introducing the formal concept of an assistant. In essence, an assistant represents the persona facing your user set. Often an enterprise will give their virtual assistant a name – it's essentially an extension of their company brand. The assistant concept within the service serves as an aggregation point for the things that enable the brand's identity.

Generally, an assistant has a Skilla formal reference to the set of Intents, Entities, and Dialogs that you created in your workspace. Any assistant you create is said to have that skill. But this formalism also makes deploying your assistant easier too. For example, having created an assistant, given it a name, and associated...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the Watson Assistant service. A good conversational agent is more than a single-turn, transactional response system. A conversation is about getting to the heart of the user's problemkeeping in mind that the first question someone asks is often not the question they really want to ask. Sometimes they don't even know what question to ask to solve their problemthey need to be walked through it. We've taught you the fundamentals of how to create a workspace in which you can train Watson to recognize the intents that your users might express, and to extract the entities within that expression. We also looked at how to build a dialog flow, in which you can guide the user through their conversation. We showed you how to jump around within that flow to address different ways that a user might proceed with their...

Creating a conversational agent workspace


Like nearly all of the Watson-branded offerings, the Watson Assistant is an application programming interface (API) hosted in the IBM Cloud. You learned how to create an account in the IBM Cloud in Chapter 1, Background, Transition, and the Future of Computing. We'll pick up from there by guiding you through the creation of an instance of the Watson Assistant service—referred to as a workspace—in which you will customize and train the service to your conversational context.

Creating an instance of Watson Assistant and a workspace

To get started, we need to create a workspace that Watson can work with:

  1. After creating an account, go to the IBM Cloud services catalog at https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/. Be sure that you are logged in with your account—you should see your username in the upper-right corner of the browser window:
  1. Otherwise, press the Log in button:

 

  1. Select AI in the All Categories section:
  1. From there, select the Watson Assistant (formerly...
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Key benefits

  • Work with IBM Watson APIs to build efficient and powerful cognitive apps
  • Build smart apps to carry out different sets of activities with the help of real-world use cases
  • Get well-versed with the best practices of IBM Watson and implement them in your daily work

Description

Cognitive computing is rapidly becoming a part of every aspect of our lives through data science, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). It allows computing systems to learn and keep on improving as the amount of data in the system increases. This book introduces you to a whole new paradigm of computing – a paradigm that is totally different from the conventional computing of the Information Age. You will learn the concepts of ML, deep learning (DL), neural networks, and AI with the help of IBM Watson APIs. This book will help you build your own applications to understand, and solve problems, and analyze them as per your needs. You will explore various domains of cognitive computing, such as NLP, voice processing, computer vision, emotion analytics, and conversational systems. Equipped with the knowledge of machine learning concepts, how computers do their magic, and the applications of these concepts, you’ll be able to research and apply cognitive computing in your projects.

Who is this book for?

If you’re new to cognitive computing, you’ll find this book useful. Although not a prerequisite, some knowledge of artificial intelligence and deep learning will be an added advantage. This book covers these concepts using IBM Watson’s tools.

What you will learn

  • Get well-versed with the APIs provided by IBM Watson on IBM Cloud
  • Understand ML, AI, cognitive computing, and neural network principles
  • Implement smart applications in fields such as healthcare, entertainment, security, and more
  • Explore unstructured data using cognitive metadata with the help of Natural Language Understanding
  • Discover the capabilities of IBM Watson's APIs by using them to create real-life applications
  • Delve into various domains of cognitive computing, such as media analytics, embedded deep learning, computer vision, and more
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Table of Contents

10 Chapters
Background, Transition, and the Future of Computing Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Can Machines Converse Like Humans? Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Computer Vision Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
This Is How Computers Speak Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Expecting Empathy from Dumb Computers Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Language - How Watson Deals with NL Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Structuring Unstructured Content Through Watson Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Putting It All Together with Watson Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Future - Cognitive Computing and You Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Another Book You May Enjoy Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
(4 Ratings)
5 star 100%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Kiran Bajwa Sep 23, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
A great read for anyone new to IBM Watson, or those familiar with it and want to build on their foundational knowledge.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Maddie Standerfer Sep 21, 2019
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Awesome book authored by @RobHigh and @Tanmay. The book is very thorough and it helped me grasp the concepts of cognitive computing. It's a complex topic that they break down through an understandable journey.Having access to the code samples within GitHub is key and helped me put the knowledge into action right away!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
William C. Dec 09, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I'm so happy I got this book! It gives a great explanation with practical examples on AI, ML and Data Science. Moreover, the reader is able to use IBM Watson's APIs to create real life applications, this was a very exciting part of the book. Anybody interested or wanting to upskill in Cognitive Computing, should have this book!
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Chandra Andhe Sep 09, 2019
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Very well written book by @Tanmay, I like the style of writing and the tone. It is easier to understand the complicated topic.Code samples provided are good and looks promising. I will be looking more deeply into the code examples but it is a great start. It is a bonus that the code is going to be updated on the GIT and will be kept up to date.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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