IBM will bring cognitive computing to the Internet of Things with the release of four Watson API services as part of a new Watson IoT Analytics offering.

At a major announcement overnight, Big Blue also said a new Watson IoT business unit would be headquartered in Munich.

It also set up a network of eight Watson IoT client experience centres worldwide, including two in the APJ region: Seoul and Tokyo.

But most attention was focused on the four new API services that the company will use to target IoT projects:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) API family – this will allow users to interact with systems and devices using simple, human language. NLP will enable solutions to understand the intent of human language by correlating it with other data sources to provide situational context.
• Machine Learning Watson API family – this automates data processing and provides continuous monitoring of incoming data and user interactions to rank data and results based on learned priorities. Machine learning can be applied to any data sourced from devices and sensors to automatically understand current conditions, expected trends, properties to monitor, and suggested actions when an anomaly occurs.
• Video and Image Analytics API family – this will enable monitoring of data from video feeds and image snapshots to identify scenarios and patterns. Such data can then be combined with machine data to gain insight of past events and emerging situations.
• Text Analytics API family – this facilitates mining of unstructured textual data, such as call centre transcripts, log files, blog comments, and tweets to find correlations and patterns in the data.