Watson Developer Cloud Python SDK

Python client library to quickly get started with the various Watson APIs services.

Table of Contents

• Before you begin
• Installation
• Examples
• Running in IBM Cloud
• Authentication
  • Getting credentials
  • IAM
  • Username and password
• Python version
• Changes for v1.0
• Changes for v2.0
• Changes for v3.0
• Migration
• Configuring the http client
• Disable SSL certificate verification
• Sending request headers
• Parsing HTTP response info
• Dependencies
• License
• Contributing

Before you begin

• You need an IBM Cloud account.

Installation

To install, use pip or easy_install:

pip install --upgrade ibm-watson

or

easy_install --upgrade ibm-watson

Note the following: a) Versions prior to 3.0.0 can be installed using:

pip install --upgrade watson-developer-cloud

b) If you run into permission issues try:

sudo -H pip install --ignore-installed six ibm-watson

For more details see #225

c) In case you run into problems installing the SDK in DSX, try

!pip install --upgrade pip

Restarting the kernel

For more details see #405

Examples

The examples folder has basic and advanced examples. The examples within each service assume that you already have service credentials.

Running in IBM Cloud

If you run your app in IBM Cloud, the SDK gets credentials from the VCAP_SERVICES environment variable.

Authentication

Watson services are migrating to token-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication.

• With some service instances, you authenticate to the API by using IAM.
• In other instances, you authenticate by providing the username and password for the service instance.

Note: Authenticating with the X-Watson-Authorization-Token header is deprecated. The token continues to work with Cloud Foundry services, but is not supported for services that use Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication. See here for details.

Getting credentials

To find out which authentication to use, view the service credentials. You find the service credentials for authentication the same way for all Watson services:

1. Go to the IBM Cloud Dashboard page.
2. Either click an existing Watson service instance in your resource list or click Create resource > AI and create a service instance.
3. Click on the Manage item in the left nav bar of your service instance.

On this page, you should be able to see your credentials for accessing your service instance.

Supplying credentials

There are two ways to supply the credentials you found above to the SDK for authentication.

Credential file (easier!)

With a credential file, you just need to put the file in the right place and the SDK will do the work of parsing and authenticating. You can get this file by clicking the Download button for the credentials in the Manage tab of your service instance.

The file downloaded will be called ibm-credentials.env. This is the name the SDK will search for and must be preserved unless you want to configure the file path (more on that later). The SDK will look for your ibm-credentials.env file in the following places (in order):

• Your system's home directory
• The top-level directory of the project you're using the SDK in

As long as you set that up correctly, you don't have to worry about setting any authentication options in your code. So, for example, if you created and downloaded the credential file for your Discovery instance, you just need to do the following:

discovery = DiscoveryV1(version='2018-08-01')

And that's it!

If you're using more than one service at a time in your code and get two different ibm-credentials.env files, just put the contents together in one ibm-credentials.env file and the SDK will handle assigning credentials to their appropriate services.

If you would like to configure the location/name of your credential file, you can set an environment variable called IBM_CREDENTIALS_FILE. This will take precedence over the locations specified above. Here's how you can do that:

export IBM_CREDENTIALS_FILE="<path>"

where <path> is something like /home/user/Downloads/<file_name>.env.

Manually

If you'd prefer to set authentication values manually in your code, the SDK supports that as well. The way you'll do this depends on what type of credentials your service instance gives you.

IAM

IBM Cloud has migrated to token-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) authentication. IAM authentication uses a service API key to get an access token that is passed with the call. Access tokens are valid for approximately one hour and must be regenerated.

You supply either an IAM service API key or an access token:

• Use the API key to have the SDK manage the lifecycle of the access token. The SDK requests an access token, ensures that the access token is valid, and refreshes it if necessary.
• Use the access token if you want to manage the lifecycle yourself. For details, see Authenticating with IAM tokens.
• Use a server-side to generate access tokens using your IAM API key for untrusted environments like client-side scripts. The generated access tokens will be valid for one hour and can be refreshed.

Generating access tokens using IAM API key

# In your API endpoint use this to generate new access tokens
iam_token_manager = IAMTokenManager(iam_apikey='<apikey>')
token = iam_token_manager.get_token()

Supplying the IAM API key

# In the constructor, letting the SDK manage the IAM token
discovery = DiscoveryV1(version='2018-08-01',
                        url='<url_as_per_region>',
                        apikey='<apikey>',
                        iam_url='<iam_url>') # optional - the default value is https://iam.bluemix.net/identity/token

# after instantiation, letting the SDK manage the IAM token
discovery = DiscoveryV1(version='2018-08-01', url='<url_as_per_region>')
discovery.set_apikey('<apikey>')

Supplying the access token

# in the constructor, assuming control of managing IAM token
discovery = DiscoveryV1(version='2018-08-01',
                        url='<url_as_per_region>',
                        iam_access_token='<iam_access_token>')

# after instantiation, assuming control of managing IAM token
discovery = DiscoveryV1(version='2018-08-01', url='<url_as_per_region>')
discovery.set_iam_access_token('<access_token>')

Username and password

from ibm_watson import DiscoveryV1
# In the constructor
discovery = DiscoveryV1(version='2018-08-01', url='<url_as_per_region>', username='<username>', password='<password>')

# After instantiation
discovery = DiscoveryV1(version='2018-08-01', url='<url_as_per_region>')
discovery.set_username_and_password('<username>', '<password>')

Python version

Tested on Python 2.7, 3.5, 3.6, and 3.7.

Changes for v1.0

Version 1.0 focuses on the move to programmatically-generated code for many of the services. See the changelog for the details.

Changes for v2.0

DetailedResponse which contains the result, headers and HTTP status code is now the default response for all methods.

from ibm_watson import AssistantV1

assistant = AssistantV1(
    username='xxx',
    password='yyy',
    url='<url_as_per_region>',
    version='2018-07-10')

response = assistant.list_workspaces(headers={'Custom-Header': 'custom_value'})
print(response.get_result())
print(response.get_headers())
print(response.get_status_code())

See the changelog for the details.

Changes for v3.0

The SDK is generated using OpenAPI Specification(OAS3). Changes are basic reordering of parameters in function calls.

The package is renamed to ibm_watson. See the changelog for the details.

Migration

This version includes many breaking changes as a result of standardizing behavior across the new generated services. Full details on migration from previous versions can be found here.

Configuring the http client (Supported from v1.1.0)

To set client configs like timeout use the with_http_config() function and pass it a dictionary of configs.

from ibm_watson import AssistantV1

assistant = AssistantV1(
    username='xxx',
    password='yyy',
    url='<url_as_per_region>',
    version='2018-07-10')

assistant.set_http_config({'timeout': 100})
response = assistant.message(workspace_id=workspace_id, input={
    'text': 'What\'s the weather like?'}).get_result()
print(json.dumps(response, indent=2))

Disable SSL certificate verification

For ICP(IBM Cloud Private), you can disable the SSL certificate verification by:

service.disable_SSL_verification()

Sending request headers

Custom headers can be passed in any request in the form of a dict as:

headers = {
    'Custom-Header': 'custom_value'
}

For example, to send a header called Custom-Header to a call in Watson Assistant, pass the headers parameter as:

from ibm_watson import AssistantV1

assistant = AssistantV1(
    username='xxx',
    password='yyy',
    url='<url_as_per_region>',
    version='2018-07-10')

response = assistant.list_workspaces(headers={'Custom-Header': 'custom_value'}).get_result()

Parsing HTTP response info

If you would like access to some HTTP response information along with the response model, you can set the set_detailed_response() to True. Since Python SDK v2.0, it is set to True

from ibm_watson import AssistantV1

assistant = AssistantV1(
    username='xxx',
    password='yyy',
    url='<url_as_per_region>',
    version='2018-07-10')

assistant.set_detailed_response(True)
response = assistant.list_workspaces(headers={'Custom-Header': 'custom_value'}).get_result()
print(response)

This would give an output of DetailedResponse having the structure:

{
    'result': <response returned by service>,
    'headers': { <http response headers> },
    'status_code': <http status code>
}

You can use the get_result(), get_headers() and get_status_code() to return the result, headers and status code respectively.

Using Websockets

The Text to Speech service supports synthesizing text to spoken audio using web sockets with the synthesize_using_websocket. The Speech to Text service supports recognizing speech to text using web sockets with the recognize_using_websocket. These methods need a custom callback class to listen to events. Below is an example of synthesize_using_websocket. Note: The service accepts one request per connection.

from ibm_watson.websocket import SynthesizeCallback

class MySynthesizeCallback(SynthesizeCallback):
    def __init__(self):
        SynthesizeCallback.__init__(self)

    def on_audio_stream(self, audio_stream):
        return audio_stream

    def on_data(self, data):
        return data

my_callback = MySynthesizeCallback()
service.synthesize_using_websocket('I like to pet dogs',
                                   my_callback,
                                   accept='audio/wav',
                                   voice='en-US_AllisonVoice'
                                  )

Dependencies

• requests
• python_dateutil >= 2.5.3
• responses for testing
• Following for web sockets support in speech to text
  • websocket-client 0.48.0
• ibm_cloud_sdk_core >=0.2.0

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

This library is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.