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Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 51 posts

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

#15
What exactly is Watson except a marketing term? I mean, as far as I understood it, it's Apache UIMA with some bare bones NLP bolted on, using RDF ontologies to power some inference. But I've never seen it being used in the wild except as a tool to win over people to the IBM-side, raking in large contracts ultimately doomed to fail due to lack of domain knowledge. It all seems so ... familiar. Now everyone is rushing into Deep Learning for NLP, but apart from things like sentiment analysis on synthetic data sets ... it's still /hard/ and needs constant attention. I really don't see how you can "IBM Watson" stuff unless you're already heavily invested on integrating NLP/ML into your workflow ... and that's tricker than it looks. The stuff on BlueMix seems nice and all, but far from a silver bullet or golden hammer when it gets down to the nitty gritty of real world data.

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

#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

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

#17
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.

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

#18
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

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

#19
post #3

Thank you for asking this question. I work at a large bank and we've seen the Watson sales pitch every year for four years now. Every time they visit we ask them this question. It would be great to hear from folks using it.

What do they say when you ask them that question?

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

#20
post #19
post #3

Thank you for asking this question. I work at a large bank and we've seen the Watson sales pitch every year for four years now. Every time they visit we ask them this question. It would be great to hear from folks using it.

What do they say when you ask them that question?

Since it's IBM, they probably have duped a few logos into buying a trial subscription as part of another sale of a more traditional product.

Voila, now everybody is "using" it

where "using" = sitting dormant.

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