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IBMWatson has today added five new APIs for developers to take advantage of since opening its artificial intelligence tools to developers last year.The new tools available in the Watson Developer Cloud include speech recognition, synthesizing natural-sounding language from text, image recognition, “concept insights” for improving search results, and trade-off analytics, for helping choose optimal outputs when there may be multiple conflicting goals. These join existing APIs related to various aspects of machine intelligence, data visualization, natural language processing, and more.

IBM’s willingness to share its research means developers can now more easily build in voice control over apps and possibly create tools (such as shopping apps) based on an “understanding” of images.

“We’ve always enabled Watson to be fairly accessible by developers,” Ed Harbour, vice president of IBM’s Watson Group, previously told Fast Company, describing the company’s released APIs as “adding colors to the palette” developers have to draw upon.

Developers must sign up with IBM’s Bluemix platform to get access to the tools, and those who come up with a money-making concept using the technology must agree to a revenue-sharing contract.

Image credit:  Carlos Correa Loyola
Via Fast Company