If you’ve ever been to a hackathon, you’re familiar with the appeal of intense competition and hands-on technical support... What if you could get all of those same benefits without having to travel? We put this theory to the test when we launched Watson’s first officially sanctioned online developer challenge. From February 19 to April 15 we invited developers to join us in a virtual competition to build the next advanced conversational application using the latest in cognitive technology. Around 450 developers joined our Watson developer community and either participated in or witnessed the building of some pretty awesome applications. We are proud to acknowledge the creativity and innovation behind each of the 26 teams that submitted an application.
Here’s a look at the top three applications submitted during the challenge:
Watson Dinner
Are you ever in the mood for a specific kind of cuisine, but you don’t have the time to go out to dinner? Watson Dinner provides the perfect interface to input your cuisine and ingredient preferences and receive a recipe to satisfy those taste buds. Built using IBM Watson Developer Cloud’s Dialog, Natural Language Classifier and Text to Speech APIs.
Fetch
Food apps have proved a bit too complicated and timely to navigate when you're hungry late at night. Using Watson Developer Cloud’s Dialog and Natural Language Classifier APIs, Fetch provides an easy and fast way to have food delivered, right to your door! All a user needs to do is send a message to the interface. Just like a loyal hound retrieves the paper, Fetch then scours the internet, sifts through local restaurant data and identifies qualified food vendors nearby.
Assist Me
Assist Me was built to deliver “an arsenal of bots at your fingertips.” With just a simple text, Assist Me gives users access to useful, everyday bots, with varying specialties. From shopping to local news, AssistMe lets users simply text a bot assistant for the information and assistance they need.
Do you feel your inner hacker awakening? Checkout the hackathon on DevPost for a list of all the submissions in the app gallery! Then start building your very own application with the help of our developer evangelists during the Building with Watson webinar series. Join us on July 13 to receive live demos of some of the winning applications, interviews with the developers and a sneak peek at some of the newest technology coming down the pipeline.
