What this book covers

Chapter 1, Background, Transition and the Future of Computing, covers what conventional computing is, its limitations, and why we need cognitive computing. It also covers the downsides of conventional computing from different angles.

Chapter 2, Can Machines Converse Like Humans?, looks at conversations through machines and the concept of devices conversing with humans like humans, which goes into the chatbots you use every day.

Chapter 3, Computer Vision, discusses how computers can be given the ability to see something and make decisions to help us in tasks such as recognizing, categorizing, and alerting.

Chapter 4, This Is How Computers Speak, is about how computers convert text to speech and vice versa.

Chapter 5, Expecting Empathy from Dumb Computers, introduces the concept of empathy, as we understand it, and what we can expect from computers in terms of emotion and personal judgment.

Chapter 6, Language - How Watson Deals with NL, covers the discovery and understanding of unstructured content via cognitive metadata. This includes two subtopics—the discovery service, and natural language understanding.

Chapter 7, Structuring Unstructured Content Through Watson, is about four APIs that Watson provides, namely, language translator, natural language classifier, document conversion, and retrieve and rank.

Chapter 8, Putting It All Together with Watson, will introduce an application that demonstrates the use of many of the Watson services that we have covered in this book. This will demonstrate how these services can be brought together to achieve a simple, but interesting and useful application of those services. 

Chapter 9, Future - Cognitive Computing and You, considers where cognitive computing is headed, and discusses some use cases in the fields of robotics and simulations, along with what you should do to move forward after completing this book. This chapter guides the reader by citing resources and providing tips about how to plan your next steps; which companies to look at for further research and jobs; and where to look if some professional help is required.