What is Watson? A Significant Part of the Future of AI

Thoughtful piece.   Despite recent criticism as not having attained enough, Watson is a genuine accomplishment.    We saw it early on and remarked about how it was the direction for enterprise AI, solving difficult, data rich problems.   I continue to watch how IBM is advancing this.   See our ISSIP and CSI speaker series, which includes many IBMers who are making real development progress, much of it available to all.    Have worked with a number of IBM Watson practitioners.  As mentioned here, its a series of microservices that will become a key part of the future of AI.   Easy to explore today.

This Is Watson
IBM Watson: Reflections and Projections
Written by: Rob Thomas
Categorized: AI | Analytics | Data Science | IBM Watson | This Is Watson

AI has gone through many cycles since we first coined the term “machine learning” in 1959. Our latest resurgence began in 2011 when we put Watson on national television to play Jeopardy! against humans. This became a cornerstone event, demonstrating that we had something unique. And we saw early success, putting Watson to work on projects with clients. This created even more excitement. That excitement led to more opportunity. At this stage, we have a large product organization, separate dedicated research organization, and an entire health organization all leveraging and building on this technology.

So, what is Watson? This is the question I’ve been asked the most since IBM combined its Data and AI software units earlier this year.

Let’s start with what it’s not. Watson is not a personal assistant like Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant – its capabilities far exceed those of a consumer AI device. However, consumers likely interact with some form of Watson every day, they just are not aware of it. That’s because Watson was built to enable business-to-business interactions. Watson technology spans everything from powering virtual assistants to embedding AI in business processes across many industries.

Watson does not have a voice, gender or personality. Many people associate Watson with the measured male voice used to bring it to life on Jeopardy! and in older TV commercials. We gave it a voice for those instances, but it is not a box that talks back to you. It is a set of composable microservices (software) that live in the cloud. Any cloud, public or private.

Put simply, Watson is software capable of making sense of data sets and understanding natural language to provide recommendations, make predictions, and automate work. As we have fine-tuned our approach, the “Watson” name is only used on IBM products and solutions that significantly utilize IBM Watson technology. For products and solutions in which AI is an embedded enhancement, we use the designation “with Watson.”  .... "