IBM debuts first Watson machine-learning APIs

Those who have been chomping at the bit to use IBM's Watson machine-intelligence service with their apps need gnaw no longer. Watson APIs are now available for public use, albeit only through IBM's Bluemix cloud services platform. IBM's Watson Developer Cloud now offers eight services for building what IBM describes as cognitive apps, with more services promised later on. Of the services offered so far, Visualization Rendering seems the most immediately useful and powerful, since it isn't limited by data training many of Watson's other services rely on. Most of the services rely on a "corpus," or cultivated body of data that Watson can use as raw material, so the breadth of several Watson offerings is limited by the size of their existing corpora.