What Version of Your Watson Cloud Stuff Am I Using?

More interesting questions from customers that are much more thought-provoking than you expected

Also published on my WordPress Blog.

In my role as a Customer Success Manager, I deal with IBM customers all of the time. Some of my customers understand the general concept of “the Cloud”, and some have more difficulty with it. Some of them understand the basics of AI, and some struggle more with it. Most people just need to hear it explained to them in English (rather than tech-speak), slowly and patiently, and they understand. Most of the confusion is because the people who should know better (the technical people building these things), all use slightly different terminology and examples to explain the concepts. Here are some of the basic Watson questions that I have found myself answering a lot this year — and some real-world answers for them.

What Version of Watson Am I Using?

This is actually a pretty good question. Just because you are using Cloud-based services, and someone else is in charge of the upgrades, doesn’t mean that you don’t need to be aware of what version of your Watson service you are using. The Watson Assistant will require a version in your API call (or in the SDK). So does the Watson Discovery service and the Natural Language Understanding service. If you are using the SDK and writing your own orchestration layer, it’s usually a good idea to…