Book Image

Cognitive Computing with IBM Watson

By : Robert High, Tanmay Bakshi
Book Image

Cognitive Computing with IBM Watson

By: Robert High, Tanmay Bakshi

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Introducing the NLU service


Let's begin with a basic look at the NLU service and interface.

Like other Watson services, you need to subscribe to the service. For development purposes, you can subscribe to the Lite plan for free. This comes with certain limitations, such as the amount of processing you can do in a given month, and you can only deploy a single custom model per Lite instance at a time (we'll cover customization later in the chapter), but that should be sufficient for most development purposes, and is certainly more than enough for what we cover in this chapter.

The NLU service uses the new IBM Identity and Access Manager approach to grant access to the service, so you should end up a with an apikey for your service credentials (rather than a username and password as you may have for other services).

You can begin with a simple program, such as this:

[Chp7-Program-1.py]

import json
from watson_developer_cloud import NaturalLanguageUnderstandingV1
from watson_developer_cloud.natural_language_understanding_v1...