IBM Watson™ made its debut in February 2011 when the Deep Question & Answer software system defeated two previous reigning human champions – Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-night special Jeopardy! showcase. The event made for carnival headlines but most news reports failed to connect Watson’s performance with its intended application- to transform the nature of human productivity in an age of information-rich, context dependent and software-mediated work environments. Watson is designed to augment (improve) our capacity to think through complex problems, ask the right questions, judge possible solutions and make informed confident decisions based on real-world data that exists within our own memory banks and beyond.
Productivity and Life-long Learning via Personal Assistants IBM Watson™ and Apple Siri™ are early signals of what might transform work and lifelong learning around software based personal assistants that push human beings to think more deeply and broadly about questions, answers and their personal confidence levels in making decisions. IBM is leading the way in an emerging paradigm for software – based on improving human cognitive performance in an era of endless streams of data and changing contexts around the marketplace and collective industry knowledge base. The next step for IBM’s Watson is to enter the workplace and help to transform the capacity of human work. IBM’s public roadmap for Watson begins in three main industries: Healthcare, Finance and Customer Service. But first, let’s explore why Watson matters….
Why Watson Matters… Natural Language, Box in a Cloud, Focus on Answers & Honesty about Confidence Levels
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