
IBM gives Slack developers access to its Watson Conversation API - sosuke
http://venturebeat.com/2016/10/25/ibm-gives-slack-developers-access-to-its-watson-conversation-api/
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gabrielgoh
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.

