Watson Insiders — A Bi-Weekly Update

January 31, 2020

This is the first in a series of bi-weekly blog posts intended to inform customers using IBM Watson services on the IBM Cloud. This will be a bi-weekly newsletter compiled by a team of IBM Watson experts, who are looking to share information on best practices, interesting techniques, educational sources and upcoming news in the world of Watson. We hope that you find this blog valuable.

New Watson Capabilities

• New Access Control in Watson Assistant!!! Check out how this will work out here in the access control documentation — but now you will be able to control access on a skill by skill basis (as well as the instance by instance basis you have enjoyed in the past). This capability will be rolled out into the IBM Cloud data centers throughout March and April.
• Check out the new Pricing Update for Watson Speech to Text Customizations. Find out how your Speech to Text customizations will be charged in the future.
• Looking for something new? Something that you thought that you heard about, but don’t see in the IBM Cloud catalog? Check out the IBM Cloud Labs — a place where all of the IBM Cloud Experimental services live. These are new capabilities that are unproven — but if you want to be on the cutting edge, this is where you will find it.

Watson Blogs and Information

• Thinking about deploying on Kubernetes, but haven’t had the time to learn about Kubernetes? If you want a relatively quick (2–3 hours) hands-on exercise, go and check out this James Belton GitHub project, which will walk you through creating a simple app, putting it into a container, and deploying it on Kubernetes.
• Did you Know? — You can now see recent platform incidents and outages, as well as the status of any of your support tickets, on your IBM Cloud Support page.

Other Watson News

• Recently there has been some A/B testing of the Watson Assistant UI going on. If you see changes to your Watson Assistant UI, don’t panic. Try it out and let your CSM know what you think of it.

Fun

• Saw one of these silly rubber chicken videos this week — this is really kind of strange.

Got questions about anything you read here? Reach out and send me an email at dtoczala@us.ibm.com, or contact your CSM.