The billion-dollar investment that IBM Corp. made in its Watson division last year is starting to bear fruit in the form of new capabilities that are rolling out to the cloud-based incarnation of the artificial intelligence this morning to help developers build smarter applications. The main addition is a computer vision service for understanding themes in images and videos.

Effectively pulling that off on a large-scale with comparable breadth of perception as the human brain is so prohibitively difficult that most organizations have to limit their analytics activities to more easily ingestible forms of information such as text. As a result, they have that much less knowledge about their customers and their buying behaviors to use in targeting efforts.

The newly introduced Watson Visual Insights feature promises to lift that limitation and make embedding computer vision functionality in an application as straightforward as learning its programming interface. The potential uses are vast: A sportswear supplier, for instance, could employ the service to pull photos from a social network and send coupons to members frequently shown to engage in outdoor activities.

That company can now also use Watson Cloud to complement the campaign with, say, a free running app that employs its speech synthesization function in order to congratulate a jogger whenever they pass a personal milestone. The feature, along with its voice-to-text converting counterpart, has been augmented as part of the launch to support Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

But international customers will still have to wait a while before they can take full advantage of Watson Developer Cloud’s language comprehension capabilities, namely the intent interference that IBM is debuting in conjunction. The vendor envisions the service used together with the new user response capabilities it’s adding to the platform to embed Siri-esque controls in everyday applications.

Rounding out the launch is a development platform due to release next year that IBM has developed to help Watson adopters train the artificial intelligence in performing more niche tasks unique to their use cases. That’s vital if IBM CEO Virginia Rometty wants to reach her lofty revenue goals for the artificial intelligence given that many of its current users operate in vertical industries such as healthcare and finance that have highly specialized requirements.

Image via IBM