Big Blue is teaming up with cloud communication platform Twilio to introduce two new offerings, IBM Watson Message Sentiment and IBM Watson Message Insights.
Twilio, which functions as a communication tool for developers and businesses, will make both offerings available as add-ons through its recently announced marketplace, according to IBM. Developers who currently access Watson technology via Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform, can also use the two new Watson offerings.
The new add-ons are designed to offer additional message enhancement capabilities through natural language processing to help businesses understand sentiment, keywords, entities and high-level concepts from text messages, with the goal of providing enterprises with actionable insights from the unstructured data, IBM said.
Easier To Integrate
The add-ons will be pre-integrated with Twilio’s APIs (application program interfaces). Twilio add-ons are designed to make it easier for developers to integrate with other platforms and technologies, according to IBM. The new offerings complement the more than 30 Watson services already available from IBM. Future plans include extending these offerings on third-party platforms such as the Twilio marketplace, IBM said. The Watson Speech to Text Add-on, as part of the Recording Add-on category, is up next for Twilio developers.
Watson is IBM’s platform for delivering cloud-based cognitive computing technologies to enterprise clients. IBM Watson Message Sentiment uses sentiment analysis to allow users to retrieve sentiment from SMS messages. For example, a customer service manager would be able to analyze customer SMS messages to determine whether they are positive, negative, or neutral, to help to assess a customer’s satisfaction with a brand, service, or product.
IBM Watson Message Insights, meanwhile, uses a combination of sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, entity extraction, and concept tagging to distill key meanings from SMS. For example, a developer would be able to extract trending topics and match specific products or services to certain sentiments.
Do More With Less Code
“We are committed to equipping all developers, everywhere, with self-service AI and IBM’s cognitive capabilities, backed by the best science, ease-of-use and scalability,” said David Kenny, general manager, IBM Watson, in a statement. “By joining the Twilio Marketplace, we have opened another avenue for many more developers to harness the power of Watson.”
The new add-ons will enhance Twilio applications by allowing them to do more with less code, according to Patrick Malatack, VP of Product at Twilio. “The IBM Watson Add-ons apply Watson’s sentiment analysis capabilities to customers’ text messages at scale, better equipping businesses with insights into how their customers feel,” Malatack said in the statement. “We’re pleased that customers can now add the functionality of IBM Watson in a single click.”
IBM said the new services are examples of its strategy to serve developers looking to build cognitive-enabled apps using the Watson platform. Both add-ons build on the cognitive APIs IBM has created in the areas of language, speech, and vision, the company said.
