Comment by mind_heist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mind_heist | Hacker News Reader

Hmm ... I along with a couple of my friends spent the last two days at the DeveloperWeek hackathon trying to explore Watson's capabilites. IBM's PaaS solution is called BlueMix and all of Watson's capabilities are available as Services for you to use.

We tried using the "tradeoff Analytics" service for the project - and I must say , the tools and help available around it, the API and its documentation is pretty bad , convoluted and unusable. This is true too other services available through watson too.

We looked into IoT ( Internet of things ) as well . And once again , ran into a ton of dead ends without being able to proceed. The API documentation and examples just suck . If you are used to playing around with well documented APIs / Tools / Languages - this is going to be frustrating.

If the OP is the person who actually wrote the article , please please please go back to Watson Dev Cloud or BlueMix and try it out your services and APIs an a consumer.

I signed up for Bluemix a while back, when the Watson beta was first announced. IBM have been very nice, they keep in touch over email and phone to see what I'm working on (and I don't even have a paid plan). I'd really like to use the platform, but I just can't. For exactly the reasons you specified.

In my last conversation over the phone, trying to set up the tools to work with Bluemix, several "Getting Started" pages for important steps lead to 404 errors.

We really appreciate the comments and will try to fix the problems. To be honest, sometimes developers can't see even the most obvious flaws in documentation. If you can highlight even one incomprehensible point it would help a lot to accelerate the revision process.

Overall the BlueMix and Watson documentation is very green and fair to call alpha-stage. This problem tends to all directions, although if a specific example would be helpful, trying to discover what load balancing options exist within BlueMix was something I tried and failed to learn last week.

For a Watson-specific example, at least a few months ago it was the case that putting together a full-featured client implementation for Q&A required poking around several obscure webpages and then plenty of runtime experimentation on top.

This talk at pyTexas is really good for laying out specific Questions to ask yourself that can guide you to better docs: http://www.pyvideo.org/video/3167/keynote-developer-experien...

Hi, sorry you didn't have a good experience with the API and documentation. I'd love to get some more details on what the stumbling blocks were. Thanks, jsstylos@us.ibm.com

Hmm .. OK . are there external facing portals to file bugs against the services ?

https://developer.ibm.com/answers/smartspace/watson/ is our forum for issues with the services.

In addition to filing bugs, I'd love to get suggestions about how we could improve the documentation. Did you find the API reference material lacking, was the problem in the procedural documentation, (or was it both)? Is the problem with our service docs or figuring out Bluemix? As @jsstylos pointed out, the forum is the way to let us know what you think - not just bugs, but thoughts on what's missing and how to improve things. We'd really like you to be successful ;-)

Hey..would love to talk to you and others and find out bit more around the issues..I am in sf for next few days..

I'm in SF and spent a few hours today trying to get the speech to text API working with very little success. I'm happy to meet with you and go through this in person so you can get helpful feedback. Short of that the feedback would be to:

1) Decouple your examples from Bluemix. It's needlessly complicating your efforts to get people using the APIs which is why people are showing up, not because they want a PAAS. At least not right off the bat. Less moving parts = better.

2) Create GOOD examples/API libraries for all the languages you're creating these examples for. The ruby on rails example is lacking. It doesn't demonstrate how to call the APIs at all. I'm using the REST API docs and the only headway I've made there is that I'm able to authenticate and create a session. Trying to upload audio using your documented approach (passing the session id as a path param) returns a 401. Passing the u/p via BasicAuth in the same request doesn't work either. As of right now I have no idea how to get an audio post to work and very little in the way of debugging information/docs.

Hi..are you free on Thursday morning I can meet up at your choice of place and work through with you..

I am free. Email me at kovacs@gmail.com

I did get things working and am working on a ruby gem that I'm hoping to be able to release for general consumption but in the mean time for folks using ruby here's a snippet that will get the simple case working once you've setup a bluemix app and bound the speech to text service to it:

https://gist.github.com/kovacs/72ad554a773a62818d46

PM sent let..can meet during lunch today and be happy to meeet

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