> The word from our engineers was that Watson was designed to sell commercials, not be a useful tool in a problem space
This is the number one thing to remember about Watson. I've worked with teams within IBM that spent years and thousands upon thousands of man-hours trying to get it to be useful in a fairly well-defined, constrained use-case. Eventually they bailed and went to what was essentially a simple decision tree. It hits it out of the park on the sexy buzz-words, but I'm ready to curse the whole field for giving customers wildly inflated expectations.
This is the number one thing to remember about Watson. I've worked with teams within IBM that spent years and thousands upon thousands of man-hours trying to get it to be useful in a fairly well-defined, constrained use-case. Eventually they bailed and went to what was essentially a simple decision tree. It hits it out of the park on the sexy buzz-words, but I'm ready to curse the whole field for giving customers wildly inflated expectations.