So, it’s been a while! I’ve been busy getting started on creating my first prototype, which I will get into more detail later, however today I am going to talk about IBM’s Machine Intelligence Watson.
Watson is an incredibly powerful piece of artificial intelligence, created by tech giants IBM, that is capable of dealing with multiple different types of problems such as natural language processing, information retrieval, personality analysis etc.
History
Originally, Watson started it’s life as a question/answer system, processing natural speech and returning the correct answer, for the sole purpose of entering the popular game show of the time, ‘Jeopardy!’. It was pitted against two former champions of the show in 2011, who were at the time unbeaten, and remarkably Watson came out on top, beating it’s opponents to the buzzer nearly every time, and eventually left with the prize of $1 million. Watson was given access to 200 million pages of information to analyse during the show, however was not connected to the internet, to display it’s ability to understand natural speech, analyse clues and retrieve the correct information.
After the success of this test, IBM wanted to start to use Watson in a commercial setting as it’s ability to understand large quantities of data can be used in a lot of different sectors such as legal advice, financial support etc.
In 2013, a relationship formed between IBM the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and a health insurance company called WellPoint, as they started to use Watson as a tool for medical diagnosis. They worked together to teach Watson how to understand and accumulate in-depth peer-reviewed medical knowledge relating to oncology and would later use that to diagnose patients. A member of Wellpoint, Samuel Nessbaum, claimed that in tests Watson’s successful diagnosis rate for lung cancer was 90 percent, compared to 50 percent for human doctors, which is absolutely incredible! This goes to show how important the future of machine and artificial intelligence are.
Current use in Industry
Since then, IBM’s Watson service has developed drastically, and with the addition of the Bluemix cloud service, anyone has the ability to use these APIs for their advantage for different applications, and you can try it for free! Some of these services include Conversation, a service to allow the creation of branching dialog and commands, and Tone Analyzer, which uses linguistic analysis to detect different tones in speech. These different systems are fairly easy to set up (for a simple application) and can be combined in many different ways to create really interesting and innovative applications.
A great example of this is the partnership between IBM and Wimbledon, using Watson to auto-curate highlights from specific tennis matches [1]. This is done by Watson analysing things such as crowd noise, social traction, and facial recognition to create a highlight reel instantly, instead of a video editor having to do this during the game and having to hand pick moments, taking much, much longer.
Another simple yet effective example, and in this case specifically for games, is Ubisofts addition of voice commands in Star Trek Bridge Crew, a VR game involving users playing the different parts of a Star Trek crew. The addition of voice commands creates a much more immersive experience, as the players can use natural speech to control different parts of the game, also getting contextual responses from the computer systems within the Star Trek universe [2].
As you can see, there is a huge variety of problems that Watson can help developers overcome, and also allows the addition of new and innovative features that would previously not be achievable within a realistic time frame.
My Project
I have decided to create a version of Battleships, using Augmented Reality tech to display animated 3D versions of the ships, and Watson’s Speech-To-Text service to allow the users to use voice commands to control the game. A games design document can be found here : ARShips GDD, detailing my ideas more in-depth.
My next post will include a tutorial for the first stages of my project, involving creating a grid in Unity and using Watson’s Speech-To-Text service to add the ability of selecting a grid cell with you voice!
References
[3] https://www.ibm.com/blogs/bluemix/2017/06/ibm-watson-powering-virtual-reality/
[4] https://www.ibm.com/cloud/gaming
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