Thinking of "Watson" more as a catchall term for machine learning research at IBM is more useful than thinking of it as a unified platform (as the marketers try

Thinking of "Watson" more as a catchall term for machine learning research at IBM is more useful than thinking of it as a unified platform (as the marketers try to sell it). This includes research efforts in speech recognition, NLP, and reinforcement learning as well as fun stuff like the "Watson chef". The underlying technology is almost completely different, but it still falls under the Watson umbrella. In general, every company (startups and big co. alike) seems to be hyping their "AI" capabilities out the wazoo, but three years ago saying those two letters together was a death sentence. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing (hype is bad, but general interest is useful for the visibility of the field) but it is definitely a sea change compared to the last 5-10 years. I am extremely skeptical of most claims these days, and am a bit worried about AI Winter 2.0 due to hype around largely mundane technologies. There are exciting things happening in the space, but these things are rarely hyped to the extent the more mundane results with corporate backing are.