
Ask HN: Is anyone using Watson in their business? - WorksOfBarry
Analytics, or language, or anything Watson
======
anon1253
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.

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shpx
"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=14766793)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14682816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14682816)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14767407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14767407)

~~~
hobofan
[https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/?category=watson](https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/?category=watson)

~~~
tpkj
The real question may be, "How many IBM-managed software consultant projects
brand their software with the Watson label AND actually use Watson services as
described here: [https://www.ibm.com/watson/products-
services/?"](https://www.ibm.com/watson/products-services/?") One thing is for
sure: Watson branding != Watson services.

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verdverm
I'd give some insights, but I don't want the stock price to go down before I
liquidate. (Or get sued) Hoping Q3 earnings are good b/c of mainframe sales,
fingers crossed!

I was hired to work on a 8+ digit contract to apply Watson, office mate and I
(only engineers on the team) were laid off 2 months into our new jobs. Do what
that company did, put cancellation clauses in any contract should IBM not
deliver.

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southpolesteve
Yes. 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...](https://www.iab.com/guidelines/iab-quality-assurance-guidelines-
qag-taxonomy/)

~~~
samfriedman
Thanks for giving an actual example. Looks like it's a tiered model, first
classing into broad categories and then the specific labels? What was
integration like: fairly straightforward or was there a long setup/tuning
process?

~~~
southpolesteve
Very straightforward. We send text, they send back categories. We then map
those to IAB categories in our own code

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apohn
I was loosely involved with a project at a very large company where they were
using Watson (all on-premise, no cloud) to classify customer feedback
(verbatims) into an existing taxonomy. This was actual customer feedback that
came through service channels, not social media chatter.

The taxonomy basically determined the escalation process within the company.
As an example, think about issues with a cell phone. "Sometimes my phone
volume goes down automatically" isn't as critical as "Sometimes my phone gets
really really hot in my pocket."

The Good: They felt Watson was doing a good job classifying the customer
feedback. Overall, they felt they could rely on Watson and could defend using
Watson instead of human raters in a legal situation.

The Bad: The amount of time/resource investment required to get it up and
running had been way beyond what they initially expected. They also felt
various parts of the system could have been more open (e.g. Watson's back end
database) to inter-operate with downstream systems. They also were exploring
if other solutions (e.g. Data Scientists + Python) could do this and had
started to see positive results.

~~~
tqkxzugoaupvwqr
Sounds like the perfect fit for machine learning. Let people continue
classifying the input text, store the input text and classification, keep
doing this for a while and you get a large training set. Regularly run ML on
it and compare results. Switch to ML when its results are good enough.

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aas1957
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".

~~~
anon1253
Not by any chance in the pharmaceutical industry? Because that story seems
eerily familiar.

~~~
jdcskillet
Has to be the financial industry... because it is also eerily familiar.

------
jey
Watson 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.

~~~
dkrich
>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.

This is exactly what it is. It's a marketing product designed to help IBM sell
the company overall as a big data company. The only people the commercials are
targeted at are C-level execs who don't know the first thing about data
science but know they have to invest in it to stay competitive. I don't work
for IBM, but I'd wager a lot that the idea for it was created by a sales team
and not an engineer.

That said, IBM is certainly not the only business to do this and it's not even
clear that it's not a smart business strategy. I'd wager that most enterprise
software sales use deception as a major part of sales strategy.

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Just1689
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.

~~~
DavidSJ
What do they say when you ask them that question?

~~~
quuquuquu
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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stbtrax
I 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.

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late_groomer
I use it to transcribe voice messages that come in through our PBX. The PBX
sends the voicemail mp3 to Watson, it sends back the transcription along with
a guess (%) on how accurate it is (then the PBX emails the transcript attempt
and voicemail attachment to whoever). It's almost always good enough to know
what the message is about, sometimes perfect, often hilarious.

~~~
samfriedman
Does it return a confidence % for the whole transcription or does it rate each
word/phrase?

~~~
late_groomer
The PBX usually chunks the send, Watson returns a % for each chunk it
processes and then the overall average upon completion.

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peteretep
With Watson, IBM appear to be trying to stop "nobody ever got fired for buying
IBM" from being true any more.

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in9
I have a friend that works at a famous credit checking company in their data
research team, here in Latin America.

He told me that IBM's data service (ie Watson) was not at all impressive. At
the time (about a year ago) their service was not worth the pay. He told me
all the solutions they provided, and the techniques they used (in terms of
algorithms and infrastructure) were very easy to implement themselves (I mean,
it was an internal data research team).

But, in our conversation, he told me that there were reasons to go for some
AWS dervices (such as integration and provided apis) or Google (the amount of
data their stuff in trained on, the infrastructure they have) could be pointed
out as reasons to hire AWS or Google. He couldn't find any that suggested
hiring Watson.

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thewhitetulip
Watson was much hyped for Cancer research and it has remarkably failed, there
was a news article a long time back. I remember that everyone in my company
was like "Watson Watson" but then the AI craze stopped. Good day are back!

~~~
tpkj
"Big Data Bust: MD Anderson-Watson Project Dies: Top Cancer Center Spent $62M"
[http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070](http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/876070)

~~~
ska
There is lots of blame to go around on why that project failed - IBM only
shoulders some of it.

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jcasman
Here's an example: Shimmy Technologies is basing their company on Watson API.
They make custom swimsuits using Watson's Speech to Text "recognizeMicrophone"
so buyers can say their measurements which then gets converted into CAD files
and Shimmy produces the customized clothing from there.
[http://www.techrepublic.com/article/stop-the-hype-the-
real-v...](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/stop-the-hype-the-real-value-
of-ibm-watson-is-driving-small-incremental-business-value/)

------
martin-adams
I 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.

[1] [https://www.ibm.com/products/watson-content-
hub](https://www.ibm.com/products/watson-content-hub)

~~~
KGIII
I believe Fark uses it to auto-generate story tags when they go green.

I'm not actually sure if this is a compliment, now that I think about it.

------
sherlokS8
I had worked with IBM until earlier last year as Watson architect.

Watson is:

1\. A brand - almost everything that has anything to do with analytics, gets
labelled Watson. From cloud services to healthcare co-developments, to
statistical software (i.e. SPSS) to anything (e.g. an e-commerce suite). 1.1
There also is "Watson Machine Learning" which is nothing more than SPSS in the
cloud. (But of course you can use it for doing ML stuff)

2\. A research project, which developed Watson as the system for the Jeopardy
gameshow event and is still continuing to develop this system/technology
further

3\. There is a Watson core system, nowadays codenamed "Watson Discovery
Advisor", which is architecturally pretty close to what was the original
research system. There are only a handful of systems built on this
architecture. It has nothing to do with the cloud services on bluemix, but is
a massive parallel pipline in which pretty decent NLP gets combined with a set
of hypothesis evidence scorer (various algorithms, from grammatical reasoning
like simple LAT to ontological reasoning, lookups, tuple- and triple searches,
indri, fulltext and other search approaches). This architecture is used for
example, to power the Watson Cancer product. Every project like this is super
expensive... speaking of 20 million +

4\. A set of APIs in IBM's cloud platform ("Bluemix").

4.1 There we have NLC, a semantic text classifier (I personally find it quite
good), a chatbot-system which pretty much is NLC with continuous training plus
a handwritten dialog tree ("Conversations")

4.2 a machine-learning-ranking based search system ("R&R", "Discovery"), which
combines an Elastic Search with a query language, paragraph handling, an NLP
pipeline (see 4.3) and a supervised machine learning based ranker. The ranker
is used to train the search to find relevant answers for a given natural
language question (i.e. long tail question answering)

4.3. A NLP pipeline, which is NOT UIMA based, but based on the AlchemyAPI
aquisition (which brought in the public taxonomy) and a SIRE based statistical
machine learning relationship extraction approach. There is a training
environment called "Watson Knowledge Studio" which lets you either program
(dictionaries, rules) or train (click instances on sample texts) the NLP to
your type system. This is running on Bluemix as "NLU" or in "Discovery"

4.4 And other stuff like image classifiers (party brought through the
AlchemyAPI acquisition, partly from IBM's research in Almaden), Speech 2 Text,
Text 2 Speech, Translation

6\. An on-premise software called "Watson Explorer" which is a mixture of the
Vivissimo aquisition (a search engine + portal + data integration) and IBM's
homegrown UIMA pipeline and a nice analytical interface (data science tool for
textual analytics - correlational analysis on text, NLP features and metadata
with deviations, timelines, etc). This pipeline can be programmed with a rule-
and dictionary based dev environment AND with the supervised machine learning
based training environment Watson Knowledge Studio (->5)

7\. Very few "products" like Watson for Oncology or ICPA, which are based on a
variation of the above technologies and sold through specific channels

8\. A Watson Health brand, dedicated to applying the Watson ideas to the
healthcare market. They "own" Watson for oncology. They also have a big set of
custom cloud APIs (some quite good and complex), like body part and drug
tagging, adverse event detection, ICD10 coding, etc.

There is a huge sales folk in IBM, who does not understand the complexity and
the breadth of portfolio the company has. Very often this results in
overselling. The big Watson projects are pitched as a "this is what you get"
plus the Watson APIs on the Bluemix cloud are shown as a "this is how easy and
cheap you can start"... sales "forgets" to mention, that there is a huge gap
between playing around with APIs and developing large systems like Watson for
oncology. Or they are pitching the big Watson story and then selling Watson
Explorer, just because this is, what they get their sales-quota for.

Also the stuff requires really skilled people to actually forge a customer
specific Watson system. I have seen many projects gone bad, just because some
product managers think "this is my product and we solve the problem with just
this" \- instead you would have needed a few good techies and an skilled
architect to develop a solution, leveraging multiple different APIs and a
combination of cloud and on-prem (Watson Explorer) to achieve a good result
for the customer.

If you know what the technology can do, do not oversell it, and have skilled
people working on it, you can built great things. I myself have lead the
implementation of a good dozens of pilots and a handful of production projects
(which are still active!)

------
codetricity
I'm not using it in my business yet, but I created an IoT project to test the
Watson text to speech API for the Renesas IoT Sandbox. See this.
[http://learn.iotcommunity.io/t/using-speech-in-your-iot-
proj...](http://learn.iotcommunity.io/t/using-speech-in-your-iot-
projects/1368)

It's actually easy to use the API and I'm hoping to use more features for the
my next project, which is a mobile app to get voice alerts of distributed IoT
data from the cloud. Not sure if this answers the question, but I think the
API is usable by businesses.

------
samfriedman
Why does IBM keep separate branding for Watson and Bluemix AI? It seems like
most "Watson-in-the-field" deployments are leveraging the Bluemix pre-baked
models for specific workflows like document classification, transcription,
etc.

Seems like they'd better align the marketing and the offering if Bluemix was
the "Watson gateway" so to speak. They could still sell and market Watson as
the custom consulting they do, with Bluemix branded as an entry point to basic
Watson functions. There's some speak of this in their product copy, but it
could probably be more obvious.

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uptownfunk
It is glorified robbery. My experience is that they are smooth talkers, roll
deep, excellent sales people, and the execution and product are lackluster.
Try to roll your own where possible or find another vendor.

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Mtinie
I’ve been using Watson’s speech-to-text libraries to automate the
transcription and tagging of videos of our usability tests.

Mixed results, so far on how accurate it is, but I also recognize that there
are likely a number of improvements that can be made to the parameters that
I’m setting for each processing run. I also have only started to play with the
custom modeling.

Right now it’s a toy, but promising for our small automation needs.

~~~
nshm
If you are processing big volumes of speech data its much better to setup
Kaldi ASR on your own infrastructure. Same or better accuracy, ability to
train and many other nice things.

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matchmike1313
As a contract developer on a social media project we started to use Watson for
analysis of posts about companies (that were clients of our client) and we had
to go another route due to the time constraints of using Watson as well as the
fact there were easier ways to use existing libraries that did "one" ML /
algorithmic task to accomplish what we were looking to do (sentiment mostly).

~~~
staticautomatic
Isn't that particular offering basically just the Alchemy API they acquired
and rolled into the platform?

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tixocloud
I believe Watson, the AI engine, is still an early concept for healthcare and
the reason I say this is that my friend is working on a healthcare startup
that collects a vast amount of information. Their partnership with IBM means
they are required to share the information that they're collecting, possibly
to provide Watson with training datasets in the healthcare space.

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chomp
We brought the Watson consultants on for the pitch, total cost for our org was
going to literally be in the millions and it was just going to be simple NLP
and integration with a couple systems. The audio NLP seemed cool, the text NLP
seemed easily replicated with modern libraries.

------
neofreko
[https://global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2017/0426_01.html](https://global.rakuten.com/corp/news/press/2017/0426_01.html)

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makemyday
Watson has a classifier, NLC. Anyone that knows what type of classifier they
are using in NLC? Take long time to train, but the respons are quite fast.

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karmicthreat
I thought IBM was a blockchain on mainframe company?

Really though, I don't think bluemix/watson has anything GCP/AWS/Azure don't
have at this point. Plus it looks like a bunch of their machine learning
research got the axe.

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max_
How would a solo dev use it if they were interested?

~~~
AlbertoGP
Apart from the free trial mentioned by sqrt17 (orange "Get started free"
button at [http://bluemix.com/](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](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.

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rb666
No.

~~~
davidpelayo
Come on! Be fairer answering a question.

