In a blog post today, AT&T SVP for technology and network operations John Donovan made the official announcement that the API for Watson (the company’s proprietary voice-recognition software that transcribes spoken words into text) are now open to and available for app developers to access.
Donovan noted that Watson API can be used for app development in seven different consumer-benefitting contexts:
• Web Search – Search from within an app with the power of your voice. Web Search is trained to recognize several million mobile queries.
• Business Search – Trained on tens of millions of local business entries, this context lets you transcribe your search query to let you find what’s in the area, from donuts to doctors.
• Voicemail to Text – No need to scribble down a message, this context-trained on a massive set of data acquired from call centers, mobile applications and the web-turns your voicemail into sharable text.
• SMS – Tuned to transcribe text, this context can deliver your spoken message as text through a messaging service of your choice.
• Question and Answer – Trained on over 10 million questions, this context accurately transcribes your question and returns the correct answer.
• TV – Searching for show titles, movies and actors? This context transcribes your spoken search queries to enable you to search the AT&T U-verse program guide.
• Generic – Automatically recognizes and transcribes English and Spanish languages. This context can also be used for general dictation, communication and search.
Language Technology
AT&T is just the latest company to get into the language tech industry. Translation Cloud API, a language-focused application, has also opened their language translation crowdsource application for app developers as well.
Machine translators provide fast and free translations, but they are not accurate. Professional translators provide accurate translations but they are neither fast nor cheap. Translation Cloud solves these issues by providing a database of professional translators that are crowdsourced the text delivered to them through the Translation Cloud app. The revised translation is then sent back automatically to the recipient.
Everything is done with a simple click of a button. It is a more accurate and less expensive solution. Translation Cloud API it is a unified, cross-platform program that can be easily adapted and integrated into other apps that wish to make use of its crowdsourcing functionality.
