About Discovery v1

IBM Watson™ Discovery v1 is deprecated. As of 1 October 2021, you cannot create new v1 instances. Lite or Advanced plan service instances are Discovery v1 instances, as are service instances that you created with a Premium plan before 16 July 2020. Existing v1 service instances are supported until 11 July 2023. Any v1 instances that still exist on that date will be deleted. Migrate your solutions to use Discovery v2 before 11 July 2023. For more information, see the Discovery v2 documentation.

Discovery makes it possible to rapidly build cognitive, cloud-based exploration applications that unlock actionable insights hidden in unstructured data — including your own proprietary data, as well as public and third-party data.

With Discovery, it only takes a few steps to prepare your unstructured data, create a query that pinpoints the information you need, and then integrate those insights into your new application or existing solution.

How does Discovery do it? By using data analysis combined with cognitive intuition to take your unstructured data and enrich it so you can discover the information you need.

IBM Watson™ Discovery brings together a functionally rich set of integrated, automated Watson APIs to:

• Crawl, convert, enrich and normalize data.
• Securely explore your proprietary content as well as free and licensed public content.
• Apply additional enrichments such as concepts, relations, and sentiment through Natural Language Understanding (NLU).
• Simplify development while still providing direct access to APIs.

To try out Discovery, see the IBM Watson™ Discovery Query Demo.

You can use Smart Document Understanding (SDU) to train IBM Watson™ Discovery to extract custom fields in your documents. See Smart Document Understanding for more information.

If you create a chatbot in IBM Watson™ Assistant, you can route complex customer inquiries to Discovery using a search skill. When a customer asks a question that the dialog is not designed to answer, your assistant can search for relevant information from Discovery, extract the information, and return it as the response. See Creating a search skill for details. (This feature is available only to Watson Assistant Plus or Premium plan users.)

For information about language support, see Discovery language support.

For information about IBM Cloud security, see the IBM Cloud Service Description

US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) support is available for Premium plans in the Washington, DC location created on or after 1 April 2019. See Enabling EU and HIPAA supported settings for more information.