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>we found that answering factoid questions isn't the most critical function so we haven't prioritized it, but it's coming This should be priority number one. A
by smitherfield 10y ago
>we found that answering factoid questions isn't the most critical function so we haven't prioritized it, but it's coming
This should be priority number one. As others ITT have been saying, your marketing and PR departments have been writing checks that the product can't cash.
When people see that Watson can't do what it does on TV, you lose a sale, and that potential customer is now going to be skeptical of IBM's future marketing claims.
It doesn't matter if "answering factoid questions" doesn't have much real-world value — it's first of all what you're marketing the product as, so it should have been done and omigod amazing yesterday, and second of all the reason why your very smart marketing and PR people are pushing that angle is because it's a demonstration that is immediately and intuitively impressive to technical and non-technical people alike.
Getting a computer to "answer factoid questions" viscerally screams "major breakthrough!" in a way that "general visual classification of earth imagery" simply doesn't. It wows people at the sales meeting instead of boring them.
IBM needs to make sales. You need to build up a userbase toot sweet before Google et al start moving into this sector in a major way, as indeed they already are. There's a limited pool of enterprise customers, they don't change vendors often, and you need to get as many as you can as fast as you can, before Google/Amazon/whoever does, or you're done.
- amelius 10y agoI'm beginning to believe that answering factoid questions is still too expensive, from a computational point of view, to put in an API.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoI'm beginning to believe IBM is a sinking battleship. Considering the job losses and the - insane - direction set by the board, it's not obvious IBM will still be around five years from now. Besides, a really good AI should literally be able to sell itself, surely?
- rrrx3 10y agoLet's not make any grandstand statements - IBM may or may not be a sinking battleship (I'm inclined to think they are), but not being around in 5 years is a pretty specious prediction. They'll still be around, and still be peddling malformed solutions. They may be significantly different in leadership, presentation, and execution, but they'll still be around.
- rvdm 10y agoI'd love to see how IBM themselves have used Watson to improve their own business. This, as a potential Watson customer, would give me a much better idea of Watson's potential and real world results. Plus it would establishes more confidence in IBM. A lesson from my high school economics teacher that has always stuck with me is that you have to be your own product's biggest believer.
- balx 10y agoBusiness Area Limited UK is seeking to expand its investments into innovative computer software projects to turn over about 78 Million USD in medical device , computer development and biotechnologies. If IBM is accepting external investment portfolios.
- daveguy 10y agoI agree. I think this is exactly why it isn't available as an API. They probably had supercomputers worth backing Watson, which they couldn't provide for every single API query. Although I still don't know why they didn't provide it and price it accordingly -- $1 / question or whatever it would require. Or shoot -- price it at expense as a loss leader. Even if they had a person filtering and approving each jeopardy answer they could price it to allow that.
- pesenti 10y agoNo. That's not the issue. We are actually able to shrink wrap it to a point that it has reasonable footprint (a few servers). The problem with factoids are twofold: - It's always a small part of a broader use case (how many queries do you do on Google that are answered by the factoid pipeline?). - It has a lot of domain dependency. It's fine to do it like Jeopardy for general domain, but our customer want domain specificity and that's non-trivial.
- snaily 10y ago> toot sweet "Tout de suite" has never before sounded so appetizing!
- douche 10y agoAnd I thought toot sweet referred to cocaine[1], which might explain some marketing... [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=FFMADAAAQBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=toot+sweet+cocaine&source=bl&ots=k1LLLkRh7x&sig=mscRl_kJ3tqxialQuImPg_q5R5k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwinnvv2h_DMAhWKaT4KHbaTD5sQ6AEIKDAC#v=onepage&q=toot%20sweet%20cocaine&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=FFMADAAAQBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=P...
- gmac 10y agoSee also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toot_Sweets https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toot_Sweets
- smitherfield 10y agoTu cherches la petite bête ! It's the common spelling when used in English; I didn't want to seem pretentious. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tout_de_suite#Alternative_forms https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tout_de_suite#Alternative_for...