IBM's Watson For Business: The $1 Billion Siri Slayer

Watson could be described as a natural language search engine. This is no small thing. It&#x27;s linguistic abilities were showcased on jeopardy, though it&#x27;s wins might have had more to do with speed of processing and &quot;buzzing in&quot; than it did with being really smart. Watson is quite possibly the most sophisticated specific use natural language program to ever exist (as opposed to general use nlp, which is star trek level problem).<p>That said, the approach and subsequent utility might not live up to the hype that IBM is pumping out. It&#x27;s one thing to search very quickly. Being able to discover patterns that lead to new levels of understanding and predictable relationships is another thing entirely. IBM is more search vs predict in part because they only have so much data to work with. All of the medical books in the world are a drop in the bucket in terms of algorithmic understanding. Watson has mastered working with all available information. Collecting and processing massive data sets is another challenge that IBM hasn&#x27;t been willing to tackle yet.<p>IBM is billing Watson as the all singing, all dancing solution to the world&#x27;s data problems. They&#x27;re tackling a lot of problems in diverse areas. I hope it works out, the world needs as much help as it can get. But IBM has shifted their core mission to be consulting and I wonder if Watson&#x27;s purpose will be to support that more than becoming a Super Siri type software project that could do the most good.

<i>“allows business users to send natural language questions and raw data sets into the cloud, for Watson to crunch, uncover, and visualize insights; without the need for advanced analytics training. After analyzing the data, Watson will deliver results to its users through graphic representations that are easy to understand, interact with, and share with colleagues; all in a matter of minutes.”</i><p>This sounds a lot like my present job description.

I&#x27;m currently working on an my own open source version of Watson&#x2F;Siri&#x2F;Google Now. (It can answer &quot;What is the capital of Brazil&quot; Yay!).<p>As part of that I&#x27;ve been leaning as much as I can about how Watson actually works.<p>The most useful information can be found by Googling &quot;Deep QA&quot; which is what IBM has dubbed their question answering pipeline.<p>A slide deck like [2] is a good place to start if you are interested in this.<p>[1] Yeah, I know that is kind of a crazy thing to work on. It&#x27;s actually even more stupid than you may think, because I want it make it self-hostable, with the ability to keep your own data separately to the rest of the application (ie, enforcing privacy).<p>[2] <a href="http://www.cs.hku.hk/news/2011/WatsonHongKong_talk_ppt.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.hku.hk&#x2F;news&#x2F;2011&#x2F;WatsonHongKong_talk_ppt.pdf</a>

I really don&#x27;t appreciate the media&#x27;s blood thirst - the slayer of this and the killer of that. Why can&#x27;t we just have something that contributes in a non-zero-sum game?

So far Watson for developers&#x2F;business is 100% PR and 0% real. In November they announced the Watson API. Where is the API? Where is the documentation? Where are the examples? Google it and you&#x27;ll get a torrent of PDF press release and incentives to call their sales team.<p>I&#x27;m afraid Watson is just a PR stunt. Was it oversold by IBM engineers to their executives? Or by the executives to the PR team? Or by the PR team to the press? I don&#x27;t know. But they lost control of it.

I wonder if the medical profession&#x27;s refusal to adopt Watson has more to do with its performance or with guild protectionism.

Seems like a lot of hype still. It needs a killer app and I haven&#x27;t yet seen one.

Watson in its original incarnation could be already quite useful. It could provide workers with valuable input on what their manager has in mind when he babbles incomprehensibly throwing his favorite buzzwords at random.<p>At least 20% of full-stack programmers job is to figure out how people want the computer to behave and all we have to work with is chaos of words that flow from their mouths and fingers.

So Siri is for consumer devices and Watson is going to be for businesses. I dont think they are going to be killing each other since they are targeting different markets.

Looks like IBM might be trying to buy good press. Plus, it&#x27;s just over a week till Q4 earnings report. I bet Rometty has seen the numbers.

Best part? What was living room-sized is now three pizza boxes. It&#x27;s less hardware, more software. That&#x27;s exciting! AWS for AI.

Wow. I wish they could provide an open source library. But that was probably too much to ask for. Still, this is amazing news.

This is awesome. It really makes me feel like we&#x27;re taking one more step into the future.