R is decidedly the most popular language used by data scientists for statistical and analytics applications. Now, for the more than two million data scientists worldwide using R, integrating cognitive APIs has gotten a lot simpler thanks to a collaboration between Columbus Collaboratory and IBM Watson.

Today Columbus Collaboratory, an advanced analytics and cybersecurity company, is releasing CognizeR, an open-source R extension that brings the power of Watson directly to data scientists so they can tap into cognitive services without leaving their native development environment. Previously, data scientists would need to exit R and code the calls to the Cognitive APIs in another language, such as Java or Python, to integrate these services — but today, CognizeR shortens this journey by providing quick and easy access.

This is an exciting step forward for us as we continually look for ways to make it easy for anyone to build with Watson. Data scientists can now seamlessly tap into our cognitive services to unlock data that lives in unstructured forms like chats, emails, social media, images and documents. Services such as Watson Language Translation, Personality Insights, Tone Analyzer, Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Visual Recognition are the first services to become available through CognizeR.

As we move forward, we’re eager to gather feedback from the data scientists using CognizeR, and we will use this input to help us determine additional cognitive services we will make available and will be most useful to this community.

We encourage you to try it out yourself. CognizeR is available for download now at Columbus Collaboratory’s GitHub repository .