IBM adds deep-learning capability to Watson

MIT Technology Review : IBM’s Watson supercomputer used two artificial intelligence techniques—natural language interpretation and deep statistical analysis of unstructured text—to become a champion on the television game show Jeopardy! Since then, the company has commercialized Watson for use in medicine and has made some of the computer’s functionality available to developers via a cloud application programming interface (API). Now IBM has announced that it is adding translation, text-to-speech, and speech-to-text functionality to Watson as well as the API. Those functions are developed by repeatedly feeding the computer a massive amount of data and training the software to recognize complex and abstract patterns. This “deep learning ” has advanced significantly in recent years but is still very specialized. IBM hopes that combining deep learning with Watson’s other capabilities will produce better results.