Create Swift mobile apps with IBM Watson services

The labs in this course show you how to add Watson cognitive analytics to mobile applications that are written in Swift and iOS.

To be successful in this course, you should have experience developing simple mobile applications in Swift and iOS. This course does not teach the basics of Xcode and Swift application development.

IBM Watson cognitive services offer a wide variety of useful features and functions such as understanding and responding to questions or statements in natural language. However, in the labs in this course, you’ll build Swift applications that can:

Overview
This lab shows you how to build a mobile application that will analyze tone, or sentiment, in text. You’ll build the application in Swift and use the IBM Watson AlchemyAPI service to analyze sentiment conveyed in text.

You’ll build a simple application with a submit button, an editable text field, and an output field.
Create a simple single view application with a graphical user interface (GUI) that includes a text field, a label, and a button.

Install the Carthage dependency manager.
Use the Carthage dependency manager to install libraries that are used by your application. You can install Carthage from GitHub or use Homebrew to update it only if you use Xcode 7.x.

Create the Watson AlchemyAPI service.
From the IBM Bluemix catalog, click Watson > AlchemyAPI > Create. Be sure to use a static API key as shown in the following image.

One of the most impressive Watson cognitive analytic services is Visual Recognition. In this lab, you’ll use that service to consume an image URL, identify the image, and return a confidence score for relevant classifiers representing things such as objects, events, and settings.

You’ll build a simple application with a Submit button, an editable text field, and an output label field.
Create a simple single view application with a graphical user interface (GUI) that includes a text field, a label, and a button.

Because you will use a separate project for this application, you must again install the Carthage dependency manager and the SDK, and then add that SDK to your Xcode project.

1. Run the Watson application by entering other image URLs in the text field and clicking the button.
The image specified by URL is sent to Watson through the Watson SDK, and Watson returns a JSON object that describes a recognized classification with some level of confidence about that image in the status field.

Now, you should understand how to create a Swift application with the Watson Visual Recognition service. The application can consume an image URL, identify the image, and return a confidence score for relevant classifiers representing things such as objects, events, and settings.

Overview
In this lab, you’ll create an application that uses IBM Watson’s Text to Speech service.
The Text to Speech service can read text and convert it to speech. For example, you can add a voice interface to an application that visually impaired users use to hear (rather than read) their email or text messages.

You’ll build a simple application with a Submit button and an editable text field. There is no output field because the output is going to be delivered through voice.

As in the previous two labs, you must again install the Carthage dependency manager, the SDK, and then add that SDK to your Xcode project.

You should now understand how to add Watson cognitive analytic services to mobile applications that are written in Swift and iOS. Specifically, you should be able to: