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Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

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

#31

Post by samfriedman »

Why does IBM keep separate branding for Watson and Bluemix AI? It seems like most "Watson-in-the-field" deployments are leveraging the Bluemix pre-baked models for specific workflows like document classification, transcription, etc.

Seems like they'd better align the marketing and the offering if Bluemix was the "Watson gateway" so to speak. They could still sell and market Watson as the custom consulting they do, with Bluemix branded as an entry point to basic Watson functions. There's some speak of this in their product copy, but it could probably be more obvious.

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

#32

Post by in9 »

I have a friend that works at a famous credit checking company in their data research team, here in Latin America.

He told me that IBM's data service (ie Watson) was not at all impressive. At the time (about a year ago) their service was not worth the pay. He told me all the solutions they provided, and the techniques they used (in terms of algorithms and infrastructure) were very easy to implement themselves (I mean, it was an internal data research team).

But, in our conversation, he told me that there were reasons to go for some AWS dervices (such as integration and provided apis) or Google (the amount of data their stuff in trained on, the infrastructure they have) could be pointed out as reasons to hire AWS or Google. He couldn't find any that suggested hiring Watson.

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

#33

Post by dkrich »

jey wrote: post #4

Watson is probably not for companies whose core competency is software. There's plenty of less glitzy and more functional machine learning tools out there. Have you tried scikit-learn and nltk? Watson seems to me like it's mostly leadgen to sell IBM consulting services to companies that don't know how to build software in-house.

>Watson seems to me like it's mostly leadgen to sell IBM consulting services to companies that don't know how to build software in-house.

This is exactly what it is. It's a marketing product designed to help IBM sell the company overall as a big data company. The only people the commercials are targeted at are C-level execs who don't know the first thing about data science but know they have to invest in it to stay competitive. I don't work for IBM, but I'd wager a lot that the idea for it was created by a sales team and not an engineer.

That said, IBM is certainly not the only business to do this and it's not even clear that it's not a smart business strategy. I'd wager that most enterprise software sales use deception as a major part of sales strategy.

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

#34

Post by tpkj »

hobofan wrote: post #18
shpx wrote: post #16

"IBM Watson" is a group of consultants and a brand. It's not an algorithm or a service or an "artificial intelligence". Don't fall for the marketing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14766793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14682816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14767407

https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/?category=watson

The real question may be, "How many IBM-managed software consultant projects brand their software with the Watson label AND actually use Watson services as described here: https://www.ibm.com/watson/products-services/?" One thing is for sure: Watson branding != Watson services.

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

#35

Post by nshm »

Mtinie wrote: post #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 s…

If you are processing big volumes of speech data its much better to setup Kaldi ASR on your own infrastructure. Same or better accuracy, ability to train and many other nice things.

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

#37

Post by ska »

tpkj wrote: post #30
thewhitetulip wrote: post #14

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

There is lots of blame to go around on why that project failed - IBM only shoulders some of it.

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

#38

Post by apohn »

I was loosely involved with a project at a very large company where they were using Watson (all on-premise, no cloud) to classify customer feedback (verbatims) into an existing taxonomy. This was actual customer feedback that came through service channels, not social media chatter.

The taxonomy basically determined the escalation process within the company. As an example, think about issues with a cell phone. "Sometimes my phone volume goes down automatically" isn't as critical as "Sometimes my phone gets really really hot in my pocket."

The Good: They felt Watson was doing a good job classifying the customer feedback. Overall, they felt they could rely on Watson and could defend using Watson instead of human raters in a legal situation.

The Bad: The amount of time/resource investment required to get it up and running had been way beyond what they initially expected. They also felt various parts of the system could have been more open (e.g. Watson's back end database) to inter-operate with downstream systems. They also were exploring if other solutions (e.g. Data Scientists + Python) could do this and had started to see positive results.

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

#39

Post by late_groomer »

samfriedman wrote: post #28
late_groomer wrote: post #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.

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

The PBX usually chunks the send, Watson returns a % for each chunk it processes and then the overall average upon completion.

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

#40

Post by jdcskillet »

anon1253 wrote: post #17
aas1957 wrote: post #11

I'm familiar with 2 large public companies that got the sales pitch, bought in and results were underwhelming or failed. From an inside sales person "we are great at selling vision and lackluster at delivering results".

Not by any chance in the pharmaceutical industry? Because that story seems eerily familiar.

Has to be the financial industry... because it is also eerily familiar.
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