This might be the fault of IBM's marketing, but it's completely unclear to me what the Watson API actually is.
From the documentation, it seems to be a suite of algorithms which do standard NLP tasks, such sentiment analysis, topic modeling, translation etc. That, with a sprinkling of some rather odd and dubious machine learning, like "personality insights".
Yet it is marketed as an expert-system of sorts, capable of mining large amounts of data and doing intelligent question answering, kinda like what we were promised with expert systems 15 years ago.
There's a big gap between what these two things are, and I've seen nothing which bridges this gap. Clearly they're doing something interesting - IBM Watson's Jeopardy AI is a pretty serious bit of work. But the APIs don't seem to expose anything remotely resembling the Watson which got all that publicity a few years ago.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 15.4 ms ] threadFrom the documentation, it seems to be a suite of algorithms which do standard NLP tasks, such sentiment analysis, topic modeling, translation etc. That, with a sprinkling of some rather odd and dubious machine learning, like "personality insights".
Yet it is marketed as an expert-system of sorts, capable of mining large amounts of data and doing intelligent question answering, kinda like what we were promised with expert systems 15 years ago.
There's a big gap between what these two things are, and I've seen nothing which bridges this gap. Clearly they're doing something interesting - IBM Watson's Jeopardy AI is a pretty serious bit of work. But the APIs don't seem to expose anything remotely resembling the Watson which got all that publicity a few years ago.