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Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

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21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#21

I saw an advert this morning on Twitter for Watson Content Hub. I checked it out[1]. Honestly it looked underwhelming as the only part that Watson came into play was auto-tagging the contents of an image when uploading. Using the Watson branding for such a narrow aspect of the product seemed more like marketing wishes than actual innovation. [1] https://www.ibm.com/products/watson-content-hub

I believe Fark uses it to auto-generate story tags when they go green.

I'm not actually sure if this is a compliment, now that I think about it.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#22
I'd give some insights, but I don't want the stock price to go down before I liquidate. (Or get sued) Hoping Q3 earnings are good b/c of mainframe sales, fingers crossed!

I was hired to work on a 8+ digit contract to apply Watson, office mate and I (only engineers on the team) were laid off 2 months into our new jobs. Do what that company did, put cancellation clauses in any contract should IBM not deliver.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#24

Yes. We use the Natural Language Understanding service at www.bustle.com for doing categorization of content. It maps decently to IAB categories: https://www.iab.com/guidelines/iab-quality-assurance-guideli...

Did you guys build a custom model or is the IAB mapping something Watson offers (I can't seem to find any details)?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#25
I’ve been using Watson’s speech-to-text libraries to automate the transcription and tagging of videos of our usability tests.

Mixed results, so far on how accurate it is, but I also recognize that there are likely a number of improvements that can be made to the parameters that I’m setting for each processing run. I also have only started to play with the custom modeling.

Right now it’s a toy, but promising for our small automation needs.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#26
I use it to transcribe voice messages that come in through our PBX. The PBX sends the voicemail mp3 to Watson, it sends back the transcription along with a guess (%) on how accurate it is (then the PBX emails the transcript attempt and voicemail attachment to whoever). It's almost always good enough to know what the message is about, sometimes perfect, often hilarious.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#27

Yes. We use the Natural Language Understanding service at www.bustle.com for doing categorization of content. It maps decently to IAB categories: https://www.iab.com/guidelines/iab-quality-assurance-guideli...

Thanks for giving an actual example. Looks like it's a tiered model, first classing into broad categories and then the specific labels? What was integration like: fairly straightforward or was there a long setup/tuning process?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#28

I use it to transcribe voice messages that come in through our PBX. The PBX sends the voicemail mp3 to Watson, it sends back the transcription along with a guess (%) on how accurate it is (then the PBX emails the transcript attempt and voicemail attachment to whoever). It's almost always good enough to know what the message is about, sometimes perfect, often hilarious.

Does it return a confidence % for the whole transcription or does it rate each word/phrase?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#29
We brought the Watson consultants on for the pitch, total cost for our org was going to literally be in the millions and it was just going to be simple NLP and integration with a couple systems. The audio NLP seemed cool, the text NLP seemed easily replicated with modern libraries.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

#30

Watson was much hyped for Cancer research and it has remarkably failed, there was a news article a long time back. I remember that everyone in my company was like "Watson Watson" but then the AI craze stopped. Good day are back!

"Big Data Bust: MD Anderson-Watson Project Dies: Top Cancer Center Spent $62M" http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070
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