IBM Watson will compete with Siri

The IBM Watson supercomputer has already become famous for beating the champions of the quiz show Jeopardy . Considering that this quiz is known in Russia as “Own Game”, in a sense, Watson is not more stupid than Anatoly Wasserman. The main purpose of the supercomputer is analytics in the financial and medical field. IBM vice president of innovation, Bernie Myerson, said last week that the corporation’s plans were to bring Watson to the consumer market, teaching him to understand oral speech and providing common knowledge. Thus, Watson can be used with a mobile application, as well as Siri.



The main advantage of Watson is outstanding intellectual abilities. Soon he will help doctors diagnose difficult and rare cases of cancer - a very demanding job! Against its background, Apple Siri looks quite primitive. However, the option of a strategic alliance, or at least the peaceful coexistence of two corporations, is not excluded. As part of one of the medical applications, Watson IBM is already working with Nuance Communications, a company whose technology uses Siri for speech recognition.



The computer running Watson contains 2880 POWER7 cores and 16 terabytes of RAM. Its performance is 80 teraflops and it is among the hundreds of the most productive supercomputers in the world. Nevertheless, while Watson is not able to with Siri in the mass market - it is optimized to answer not very large number of difficult questions, while Siri is able to quickly respond to millions of simple ones. However, the project team has achieved significant success in optimizing Watson. According to Bernie Myerson, Watson 2.0 consumes much less resources than previous versions.



Most likely, IBM plans to conquer the market from top to bottom - starting from the corporate segment, then selling Watson services to individual VIP customers willing to pay serious money, and only then go to the consumer level. IBM expects to increase profits from business intelligence services to $ 16 billion by 2015. Perhaps it is Watson that will achieve this goal.

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