Analytics, or language, or anything Watson
Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#2No.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#3Thank 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.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#4Watson 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.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#5How would a solo dev use it if they were interested?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#6How would a solo dev use it if they were interested?
get a free 30-day trial of Bluemix. The Watson tools are accessible through Bluemix and there's a free tier that allows you to try out things for yourself.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#7I worked with a large company that was one of IBM's 'partners' for watson. They mostly used the partnership for the free publicity, but complained about how terrible all of the disparate watson services were. In the end they ended up replacing most of the services with google ones, but maintained the public partnership.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#8How would a solo dev use it if they were interested?
Apart from the free trial mentioned by sqrt17 (orange "Get started free" button at http://bluemix.com/), you can find open source (Apache 2.0) SDKs for different languages.
The one I used for NodeJS: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/node-sdk
It was useful to read the source code to figure out some aspects I didn't find in the documentation.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#9I 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.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business?
#10Yes. 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...