Launching Embeddable AI

According to Andrew Ng, AI is the new electricity and just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, I can’t think of a single industry that AI won’t transform in the next several years. Every application and solution — from CRM, ERP, and cybersecurity to HR, e-commerce, and process automation — will have AI built into them. Companies have a choice — build their own AI from the ground up, which would take significant investment, resources and time (or) partner with IBM to embed cutting edge AI into their solutions.

Today, we at IBM are proud to announce Embeddable AI, an initiative that includes a set of flexible, enterprise-grade AI products that developers can easily embed into their applications. IBM’s embeddable AI portfolio includes two main types of products that can be accessed in different ways to meet the unique needs of different users — via flexible libraries and APIs or applications.

This week’s launch includes three new embeddable AI libraries :

• IBM Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP) : A library designed to help developers provide capabilities to process human language to derive meaning and context..
• IBM Watson Speech to Text : A library that uses industry leading natural language AI technology to understand human voice and turn it into usable, searchable text in real time.
• IBM Watson Text to Speech : A library that converts written text into natural-sounding audio in a variety of languages so you can deliver real-time speech synthesis and multilingual support.

This is just a start and and we expect to launch more “Embeddable AI” products in the near future.

IBM’s embeddable libraries offer a lot more flexibility compared to whats available through cloud providers such as AWS, Google or Azure. For one, they include a wide variety of models and runtime configuration options that allow ISVs to pick what best suits their use case. More importantly clients can embed and deploy these libraries “Anywhere” including their own data center or any public cloud of their choice. This is critical for companies & ISVs who want flexibility and avoid vendor lock-ins, especially given AI addresses a wide range of horizontal and vertical use cases (see below for a subset of use cases for NLP & Speech)

AI is a game changer and companies are re-tooling their products and business processes to remain competitive. In essence, AI is transforming the entire world just like electricity upended every facet of our society in the early 1900s. With today’s announcement, IBM is declaring that it wants to be in the market of providing “embeddable” AI, the new electricity. For more details & a trial experience, checkout out our Embeddable AI website or feel free to drop me a note.