What's new and changed in Watson Discovery

Watson™ Discovery updates can include new features, bug fixes, and security updates.

Installing or upgrading Watson Discovery

Ready to install or upgrade Watson Discovery?
Related documentation:

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.7.3

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in September 2023 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.7.3.

Operand version: 4.7.3

This release includes the following changes:

Version 4.7.3 of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.

Several security patches were applied

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.7.1

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in July 2023 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.7.1.

Operand version: 4.7.1

This release includes the following changes:

New features

The 4.7.1 release of Watson Discovery includes the following features and updates:

Optical character recognition V2 is used by default
The latest version of optical character recognition (OCR) is used automatically when you enable OCR for English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Hebrew collections.

The newest version of the OCR model is better at extracting text from scanned documents and other images in the following situations:

  • The images are low quality because of incorrect scanner settings, insufficient resolution, poor lighting (such as with mobile capture), loss of focus, misaligned pages, and poor print quality.
  • The documents contain irregular fonts, various colors, different font sizes, or a background.
For more information, see Optical character recognition in the Watson Discovery product documentation.
Improved tool for creating Smart Document Understanding (SDU) user-trained models
The SDU tool that you use to annotate documents was rebuilt to be more responsive and easier to use.
Several security patches were applied

Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.7.0

A new version of Watson Discovery was released in June 2023 with Cloud Pak for Data 4.7.0.

Operand version: 4.7.0

This release includes the following changes:

New features
Version 4.7.0 of the Watson Discovery service includes the following features and updates:
Change how words are normalized for a collection
You can now configure a collection to use stemming to normalize words in the index and queries. For more information, see Enabling the stemmer for uncurated data in the Watson Discovery documentation on IBM® Cloud.
Specify the types of files to add to your collection from crawled sources
When you connect to the local file system or a FileNet® P8 data source to crawl data, you can limit the types of files that are added to the collection. For example, you can choose to add only PDF or JSON files. For more information, see the following topics in the Watson Discovery documentation on IBM Cloud:
Secure Windows File System traffic with TLS
Secure the traffic that is sent between the Windows Agent service and the crawler by configuring your Windows File System collections to use the transport layer security (TLS) protocol. For more information, see Windows File System in the Watson Discovery documentation on IBM Cloud.
Online backup and restore with OADP
You can now use the Cloud Pak for Data OpenShift® APIs for Data Protection (OADP) backup and restore utility to do an online backup and restore of Watson Discovery.

For more information, see Cloud Pak for Data online backup and restore.

Offline backup and restore with OADP is not available for Watson Discovery.

Migration from MinIO to Multicloud Object Gateway
Starting in Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.7, MinIO is replaced by Multicloud Object Gateway. All data that was stored in MinIO will be migrated to Multicloud Object Gateway when you upgrade to Cloud Pak for Data Version 4.7.

Ensure that Multicloud Object Gateway is installed before you install or upgrade Watson Discovery and that you create the secrets that Watson Discovery needs to communicate with Multicloud Object Gateway.

For more information about how to install Multicloud Object Gateway and create secrets, complete the required prerequisite steps in the topics that describe how to install and upgrade the service.

API updates
The Collections API has the following enhancements:
  • You can define JSON normalizations for documents.
  • New objects are available that share information about the status of documents that are being enriched or added to a collection.

For more information, see the Collections API reference in the Watson Discovery documentation on IBM Cloud.

Issues fixed in this release
This version of the Watson Discovery service includes various fixes.
Apply SDU models to Microsoft Office documents in FIPS environments
You can now apply a Smart Document Understanding model to Microsoft Office documents that you add to a collection in a cluster that is Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) compliant. For details, see Define a user-trained SDU model in the Watson Discovery documentation.
Several security patches were applied