IBM has acquired AlchemyAPI, a Denver-based provider of cognitive computing application program interface (API) services and deep learning technology. The goal, IBM says, is to improve the development of advanced cognitive computing applications. The acquisition also expands the Watson ecosystem, with the addition of 40,000 developers to the IBM Watson developer community. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"IBM continues to invest in Watson‘s core technology and cloud development platform, amplifying a robust Watson ecosystem where third-party organizations are creating new businesses and solutions powered by Watson," said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson.
AlchemyAPI’s platform enables users to build applications with advanced data analysis capabilities such as taxonomy categorization, entity and keyword extraction, sentiment analysis and web page cleaning. The software platform processes billions of API calls per month across 36 countries and in eight different languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
In January 2014, IBM launched the IBM Watson unit, a business dedicated to developing and commercializing cloud-delivered cognitive computing technologies. IBM plans to integrate AlchemyAPI’s technology into the core Watson platform, augmenting Watson's ability to identify hierarchies and understand relationships within large volume datasets. The technology is expected to enhance Watson's ability to ingest, train and learn the “long-tail” of various data domains – including general business and target industries, as well as address the need to manage constantly evolving ontologies.
In addition, the acquisition will add to the number and types of scalable cognitive computing APIs available to IBM clients, developers, partners and other members of the Watson ecosystem, including language analysis APIs to address new types of text and visual recognition, and the ability to automatically detect, label and extract important details from image data.
For access to the AlchemyAPI services, go to www.bluemix.net.