IBM is adding to Watson’s roster of online services that developers can use to enhance their applications with data processing and analysis capabilities.

Since its October 2013, the Watson Developer Cloud has built up a 5,000-strong user base of developers, and its services are currently deployed in more than 6,000 apps. For now, all of the services on the Watson Developer Cloud are still in beta, which means they’re free for anyone to use.

The eight services available now becomes thirteen, thanks to the addition of five new services including Concept Insights, Speech-to-Text Translation, Text-to-Speech Translation, Tradeoff Analytics and Visual Recognition. IBM says each of the new services can be embedded into desktop or mobile apps via APIs, offering advanced functionality that developers would find too laborious and time-consuming to build by themselves.

As for the actual services, they all sound very promising. The Concept Insights search service is a unique tool that allows users to search for ‘concepts’ rather than the usual keywords. Each search can pull up two lists of results – one that containers material matching the exact keywords, and a second list of ‘implicit’ results that match more general concepts related to the search term.

Speech-to-Text Translation does what the name suggests, allowing developers to add voice input capabilities to their apps, similar to Apple’s Siri. However, IBM says its engine is much more responsive due to its lower latency. It also employs machine learning techniques to familiarize itself with different accents and language structures, thus becoming ‘smarter’ over time.

Watson can now also do Siri in reverse, thanks to the new Text-to-Speech Translation. Developers can now use the same voice that Watson used in its famous 2011 Jeapordy game show appearance for their apps, and it can speak either English or Spanish.

Tradeoff Analytics is one of the more intriguing services. It’s a tool that dynamically weighs multiple options to decide which is the best one for a specific users. For, for example, it might be used to help medical patients decide which treatment option is best suited for them, or it might help someone decide which is the best vehicle for them to buy, depending on their needs. Tradeoff Analytics relies on a statistical analysis technique called Pareto filtering to assess the pros and cons of different options, before concluding which one is the most suitable.

Finally, there’s Visual Recognition, which is able to analyze an image or video and summarize the material presented in a list of words. For example, it can recognize objects, events and places. The service could be used by someone wanting to classify a large set of images, therefore saving them hours of manual labor.

Watson’s cognitive computing powers could have big implications in a wide range of industries, a point that IBM is often keen to promote. Healthcare is one that’s often cited – for example, Watson can make similar recommendations to what a doctor might make, and push these directly to a patient’s smartphone.

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