I have lately been through several pitches from companies and "architects" where they were talking about using IBM Watson but they rarely get into detail what they get from it. Is this just a buzzword for sales guys or are people doing something productive with it?
Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#2I dunno about Watson, but it is my (inspecific) opinion that at least one state government and at least one upper-middle-sized corporation have a bunch of IBM big iron laying around that they don't need.
The real burn is, that's not JUST an upfront cost... You pay per month.
At the corp, I could not find anyone except the CEO that thought the investment was a good idea. I figure IBM gifted him a car or something. Complete speculation, but it's the only thing that makes sense!
Elsewhere, inspecifically... At least the machines are used. But honestly how many giant black modern IBM boxes does it take to fully emulate every single AS/400 machine that existed within the entity back in 1996? A quick look at the specs tells me: 1. There's no way it would take more than one.
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#3Outside of some niche areas right now I think what you are hearing is people trying to pitch others to pay for their time to experiment and build something with Watson. Not that they already have a solution, again except for some niche industries and groups.
Overall, IBM is having to reinvent itself (again), and IBM people themselves are pushing in new directions and pitching new ideas which fit their longer term plan. At the same time they have this huge legacy dragging behind them, so it can't be easy. Personally, I have never been a huge fan of some of the total crap (consulting mainly) they put out there, but then they do some crazy amazing stuff with their research groups. And I have seen a few really stellar software consulting gigs they have done too, but that seems to be the minority. But at least I'll say for them, they aren't Oracle, and they will complete a project.
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#4I've posted my results with using their speech-to-text system:
https://github.com/dannguyen/watson-word-watcher
I think it's actually very good and could be of great use to people needing to mine and organize audio -- not for perfect transcriptions, but as a first pass solution...but I don't think that's the small vision that Watson purports to cater to...that is, if you fed the results of the speech-to-text into Watson's various language processing APIs, you'd get diminishing returns, though to be fair, I haven't really used those other APIs in bulk programmatic fashion yet [1]
[1] http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl...
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#5I personally thought their tradeoff api was pretty interesting, but until I hear/see some real world results, I will continue to be skeptical. If anyone here could shine some light on something that would be awesome.
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#6I've used it for a prototype project for the news industry, though not in production.
IBM Watson: Building a Cognitive App with Concept Insights
http://www.primaryobjects.com/2016/02/01/ibm-watson-building...
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#7I've looked into it for some past hackathon projects and a side project. Watson can take care of some of the heavy lifting of NLP, categorization, or parsing large volumes of text, et, in different ways, but it's not some jeopardy-winning AI you can just plug into something you already have (at least not yet). It can abstract away some tricky challenges if your needs fit what it can do.
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#8I had one company that used Watson flat out tell me that it was purely for marketing - they could have built their own solution just as easily, but used Watson because it had more marketability.
From what I understand, it's really just a wrapper around IBM, or a collection of things IBM has built or offers.
I have not yet seen anything particularly interesting - but i'm glad you asked this question! Hopefully someone will chime in with something worthwhile.
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#9Yeah. People are using it.
-- For starters, Watson has taken residence at three of the top cancers hospitals in the US -- Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and the Mayo Clinic -- where it helps with cancer research and patient care.
-- In Australia, the company ANZ Global Wealth is focused on the latter. The company uses the Watson Engagement Advisor Tool, an NLP SaaS offering, to observe and field customer questions. Similarly, DBS bank in Singapore uses Watson to ensure the proper advice and experience for customers of its wealth management business.
etc etc. -- http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-watson-what-are-companies-u...
Re: Ask HN: Is anybody doing something productive with IBM Watson or is it just BS?
#10It's just BS.