

IBM Pocket Watson a Siri-Killer - jhull
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-28/ibm-creating-pocket-sized-watson-in-16-billion-sales-push-tech.html

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mmanfrin
I have a feeling this will be as gamechanging as Wolfram Alpha was.

Great technology, but there are already products out there that are _okay_
enough to placate a lot of the incentive for consumers to adapt a non-baked-in
application.

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busyant
I'm not sure what you mean by "gamechanging"

What games has Wolfram really changed out there in the real world?

Wolfram seems kind of nerdy cool, but for me it's mostly been like bar-trivia
crossed with nice mathematical function plotting.

~~~
gue5t
That's the joke.

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huhtenberg
> _A farmer could stand in a field and ask his phone, “When should I plant my
> corn?” He would get a reply in seconds, based on location data, historical
> trends and scientific studies._

Historical trends, scientific studies... pfft.

"It's 6AM in the morning, you are lying on the ground and you are two states
away from your farm. Also you are a dairy farmer, so the answer is that you
should never plant your corn, John."

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GreyZephyr
This is already true and has been for years. Cereal farmers were some of the
earliest adopters of GPS and autonomous vehicles. I remember being at a rural
show in the early 90's and CASE had a combine harvester for sale that recorded
the grain yield per 10 square meters of the field via GPS, and if you bought
radio beacons for the corners of the field, it was capable of resolution of
about a square meter and semi-autonomous operation (though I wouldn't have
wanted to stand in front of it). By this point the software if a major part of
what differentiates the various models [0]. These days farming, especially
crops is incredible technologically focussed. If you are not tracking crop
yield and soil nutrients, you have no way of knowing how much fertiliser,
pesticide or seed to spread at each point, which equates to massive waste.
Given the margins for farming are incredible slim, and you are often over 5
million in debt, just to finance that years crop, the relative cost of
investing in the latest technology is small. By comparison to the integrated
systems that tie in everything from soil quality, to transport, to current
grain spot prices, this is a toy.

It's not that Watson is not impressive, it's more that I get irritated when
journalists talk about farming as if it is merely getting up each morning and
riding around on a tractor idea before heading home to the wireless as they
haven't yet got anything as new fangled as television. My apologies.

[0]
[http://www.deere.com/wps/dcom/en_INT/products/equipment/comb...](http://www.deere.com/wps/dcom/en_INT/products/equipment/combines/combines.page)

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lttlrck
Misleading title... the article explicitly states they are trying to figure
out how to do make it work on mobile platforms and that it could enhance
Siri...

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tsotha
Is Siri useful enough to "kill"? From what I can tell it's mostly used for
entertainment as people ask questions and laugh at the nonsensical results.

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thejerz
I use Siri every day for dictation, sending emails, replying to texts, and
setting reminders. I guess I asked it nonsensical questions on the day I got
my 4S... but not since then. I would say: yes, it is useful enough to "kill."

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jpxxx
TL;DR: So this thing that has absolutely nothing to do with this other thing
is going to kill the other thing because it's going to be so much awesome when
it's a thing because as soon as its a thing then you can use it as a thing
that's totally unlike this other thing.

Because IBM and smartphone cloud.

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samirahmed
One trend I dislike, is the forced use of voice recognition in these cases. A
machine as powerful as Watson should not be limited to my mobile device, it
should be available via all my computing platforms and should be able to
interpret text form.

Siri, for example, can get me David Beckhams age very fast ... It would be
nice on my laptop to get access to that type of speed, hit cmd+space "how old
is david beckham" and get a result. I understand google can do alot of this,
but why limit this technology to voice input only and mobile devices only

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davmre
This is actually exactly Google's strategy. The Siri-competitive voice search
in Jelly Bean is really just an interface to Google search, which has been
extended to answer a lot of the same basic questions that Siri can handle (for
example, it manages "how old is david beckham" just fine). This means you
should be able to get the exact same results by just typing the query into
your laptop's Google search box.

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DigitalSea
You often hear those words, "X killer" but funnily enough Watson is actually a
game-changing thing. Even if IBM fails in the consumer market the very fact
they're pulling big financial and medical contracts is still just as good for
IBM.

It will be interesting to see where this goes and what happens.

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tluyben2
It's also not a Siri killer because they are going to sell it to businesses
while Siri is mainly a consumer toy.

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mark_l_watson
I love this: two very well capitalized companies competing to create useful
AI-enabled systems.

You can reasonably argue that Watson is not a "real AI" but anything that
pushes forward AI research is a good thing as far as I am concerned. BTW, I
don't spend time worrying about 'evil AIs' running amok like some of the
singularity crowd does.

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DeepDuh
It's so typically IBM to concentrate on Businesses and forgetting consumers
with a technology that could even eat into Google's market. They should
partner with Microsoft / Nokia and get license fees for every Windows phone.
Now that would be some exciting stuff getting people to buy WP8.

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thejerz
If IBM does this and makes a search engine website, they could mop the floor
with Google.

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finkin1
Man, I need to know when to plant corn.

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marquis
Spend enough time on a farm and it doesn't become that difficult to figure
out: you guess, based on what you know about the seasonal weather. Watson is
never going to know more about the weather than you can get on weather.com.

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dbuxton
Actually farmers already pay lots of money for localised weather forecasts
exactly because there is a significant amount of information that weather.com
doesn't give you.

Not sure what 10 racks of PCs will be able to add to the science of weather
forecasting though, given the scale of investment necessary to be a player in
that field: <http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/in-depth/supercomputers>
(although the Met Office do use IBM...)

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marquis
Right, I was of course being glib about weather.com. It may then be a useful
service for something with Watson's capabilities to narrow down to your
specific needs and historical data. I am fascinated by weather prediction,
it's an interesting field, and I find I can't trust any detailed weather
reading more than 3 days in advance (aside from large weather patterns, which
seems readable for about 10 days ahead) so if there is something out there
that works longer-range it would be quite amazing to know.

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zerostar07
Where can one read about the machine learning technologies that ibm is working
on?

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PaulMcCartney
Behold, PoWa!

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bishnu
It can't "kill" Siri because IBM will never be able to integrate it as tightly
with iOS due to App Store restrictions. Sorry IBM! That's what you get for
building a product instead of a platform.

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pooriaazimi
They make a deal with Apple and get paid handsomely because of that. An ad-
supported app has to be on _many_ devices, and to be run a very long time to
be worth $100 million dollars or so (that's probably how much the deal would
cost for Apple).

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jlgreco
Exactly, this is the IBM of the 21st century we are talking about. They don't
make their money by doing business with _people_ , they are all about research
and contracting for companies now.

