Can I use IBM Watson services without Bluemix?

Question

I've been using AWS for hosting my backend servers. What's the best way to sign up an account so I can call Watson services from my servers directly, without an account on Bluemix? If yes, how? I couldn't find that at Watson's website. Thanks.

Williford

Answer 1

You can absolutely use the Watson APIs from platforms and endpoints other than Bluemix. They are all REST APIs that do not restrict access by the source of the call. You do however have to use Bluemix to sign up, get credentials and for billing.

I am a developer evangelist with IBM Watson Developer Cloud.

Dusa

Rich, Thanks for your reply. A follow-up, if a Watson service (say speech to text) was used directly by our games/apps/devices sold to millions of customers, how do we not to expose our Bluemix account/pwd to the end users? This might be another top-level question. Thanks. – Williford

@NathanW In terms of general security and architecture, you should avoid giving users direct access to Watson services, as that may expose you to malicious use. Instead, I would strongly advise brokering/proxying all calls through your servers, with appropriate rate limiting, batching, etc. Disclosure: I am an evangelist for IBM Watson. – Goniometer

Abtin, Thanks. Proxying was my first thought also. But, that means 2 roundtrip calls, device -> proxy -> Watson -> proxy -> device. Using Bluemix might reduce that latency a bit, I guess. – Williford

@NathanW If you really want to do this, take a look at the documentation for how to generate authentication tokens at ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/…. – Goniometer