- Before you can work with IBM Watson
and the many other IBM Cloud services
that are available to you,
you will need to register for an account.
And one of the things that's nice about IBM
is that you can sign up for free
to use most of the services.
And no credit card is required,
which makes it particularly nice as well for students
to use this service to learn various Watson capabilities,
but also various AI capabilities in general as well.
Now one of the things that you'll find
in the online documentation for each service,
and we'll start to see this in subsequent videos,
is that they list for each service
what the tiered offerings are.
The free lite tier that's available for most,
but not all of the services,
does limit your use.
But in our experience provides enough access
to enable you to learn how to use Watson,
and start to develop your apps.
And the paid tiers are available if you decide
to go further and use it for commercial applications.
So to sign up for your free IBM Cloud account,
you are going to want to go to this URL,
cloud.ibm.com/registration.
You'll want to complete the form that they provide there.
And once you do that,
you will receive an e-mail in your inbox
with instructions on confirming your account.
So you do want to make sure you go through that process
before continuing with this lesson,
if in fact you plan to sign up to use
the various Watson services that we'll use
in our language translator app later on in this lesson.
Now separately,
once you've registered,
you'll be able to go to the Watson Dashboard.
And from there you're going to have your launch point
where I'll show you later on in this lesson
how to register for several of the services
that we're going to use,
get the credentials for those services
and, as you'll see,
we'll store those credentials
in a source code file called keys.py
in the folder for this lesson's examples.
And from there we'll load up those credentials
as we begin working with the various IBM web services.
Now I just want to take a moment to show you
this developer dashboard.
So this is the Watson Dashboard,
and from here,
and in the next several videos in particular,
we're going to be browsing through some of these services.
You also have access to the existing services
that you've registered for.
So I'm going to open that
in a separate tab here just to demonstrate.
And as you can see here,
I have three services that I've signed up for.
And later on in this lesson,
you will sign up for these same three.
And I'm actually going to delete these
before I show you how to do that
so that you see the process from scratch.
But all of this requires you to be logged in
to the IBM Cloud in the first place,
otherwise you can't access registering for a service
and getting the credentials that you'll need.
Separately, in this same web page here,
you'll notice that there's a lot of developer resources,
including the documentation that you'll use
if you want to learn more about the services
beyond what we show you in this lesson.