4 ms·

A couple of years ago I was given a project that was essentially "Evaluate Watson APIs to see if there's anything there we could make use of", and came away wit

A couple of years ago I was given a project that was essentially "Evaluate Watson APIs to see if there's anything there we could make use of", and came away with the distinct impression that it was largely smoke and mirrors, and there was very little that was either effective or interesting there.

drvdevd 9y ago
Could you elaborate a bit? I'm not affiliated with IBM or anything, just curious what you were looking for and what was missing.
- dr_zoidberg 9y ago
  I'll give you my experience. Manager asked me if we could use the Watson Speech-to-text API a couple of years ago, because he was impressed with the ads he'd seen. I worked for a week. Turns out the "dialect" of spanish that is spoken in Argentina (and this was tested against porteños, not even the accents from the provinces!) is utterly unsupported. Even when speaking slowly, it'd throw a random set of words with even more random looking probabilities. Manager was expecting that after a week we'd have something akin to Googles "hello google!" at hand, through Watson. It took a couple of coworkers to come up with even more impressive broken examples to finally convince him that the technology was bad.
  - _jal 9y ago
    An interesting example of negative-sum advertising. Everyone involved lost money. I wonder how often that happens.
    - drvdevd 9y ago
      I hadn't even considered that point of view ... quite interesting. EDIT: I have to say, I bet this happens quite often in fact, especially with software.
  - drvdevd 9y ago
    Interesting! Thanks for the concrete example. It's bad enough trying to convince managers as to the specifics of why some product doesn't work for your project.. even worse when said product has great marketing.
maxxxxx 9y ago
Our IT department has been talking about Watson for a while but I never could get anything out of them what it's really supposed to do. From what I can tell it's a very slick marketing term with some mediocre tech behind it.
- gaius 9y ago
  It sounds like Autonomy. Or Palantir.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  As far as I understand (and I have only passing knowledge on this, as we've been evaluating machine learning technologies for our startup) IBM Watson is just a set of APIs you can use to build your own solution, and the APIs themselves are not top-of-the-line (Google's are.) The other day I saw a TV ad for Watson for the first time: the ad showed a bunch of aeronautical engineers who instead of having to take all kinds of measurements of airflow around a hull or who knows what else (the TV was muted) now sat behind a single computer that would do the whole thing for them. It was such bullshit, I couldn't believe my eyes. Imagine Amazon promoting SES as this amazing tool that'd automatically send marketing emails and create a marketing funnel and drive user acquisition cost down by a factor of 100X, without you having to do anything. That's the level of vaporware they are selling.
  - RHSman2 9y ago
    Very few out of the box machine learning services work other than speech-to-text by the worlds greatest company in that field (google). It's not a case of roll your own but find companies that can help you deliver s solution to your specific problem. (That is my business) This is the absolute bullshit of Watson. What it could be is a series of very good datasets and then being able to build models (based on recipes) and deploy them. It's so unbelievably clunky though. And Bluemix? Urgh
chrisco255 9y ago
My team and I were able to build a pretty good chatbot with Watson two years ago. We used Google for speech-to-text, however, as we found IBM's to be behind in that area. We had to use a Node.js proxy with a couple libs to parse out some natural language features (like time)...but overall it worked pretty well. At the time, it was the only open system I knew of to write things like this. Today, of course, there's the Alexa API from Amazon and Microsoft's LUIS, which are probably vastly superior for this sort of thing.
iampims 9y ago
Their text to speech API is pretty decent and was the cheapest available until Amazon Polly.

drvdevd 9y ago

Could you elaborate a bit? I'm not affiliated with IBM or anything, just curious what you were looking for and what was missing.

dr_zoidberg 9y ago
I'll give you my experience. Manager asked me if we could use the Watson Speech-to-text API a couple of years ago, because he was impressed with the ads he'd seen. I worked for a week. Turns out the "dialect" of spanish that is spoken in Argentina (and this was tested against porteños, not even the accents from the provinces!) is utterly unsupported. Even when speaking slowly, it'd throw a random set of words with even more random looking probabilities. Manager was expecting that after a week we'd have something akin to Googles "hello google!" at hand, through Watson. It took a couple of coworkers to come up with even more impressive broken examples to finally convince him that the technology was bad.
- _jal 9y ago
  An interesting example of negative-sum advertising. Everyone involved lost money. I wonder how often that happens.
  - drvdevd 9y ago
    I hadn't even considered that point of view ... quite interesting. EDIT: I have to say, I bet this happens quite often in fact, especially with software.
- drvdevd 9y ago
  Interesting! Thanks for the concrete example. It's bad enough trying to convince managers as to the specifics of why some product doesn't work for your project.. even worse when said product has great marketing.

maxxxxx 9y ago

Our IT department has been talking about Watson for a while but I never could get anything out of them what it's really supposed to do. From what I can tell it's a very slick marketing term with some mediocre tech behind it.

gaius 9y ago
It sounds like Autonomy. Or Palantir.
dguaraglia 9y ago
As far as I understand (and I have only passing knowledge on this, as we've been evaluating machine learning technologies for our startup) IBM Watson is just a set of APIs you can use to build your own solution, and the APIs themselves are not top-of-the-line (Google's are.) The other day I saw a TV ad for Watson for the first time: the ad showed a bunch of aeronautical engineers who instead of having to take all kinds of measurements of airflow around a hull or who knows what else (the TV was muted) now sat behind a single computer that would do the whole thing for them. It was such bullshit, I couldn't believe my eyes. Imagine Amazon promoting SES as this amazing tool that'd automatically send marketing emails and create a marketing funnel and drive user acquisition cost down by a factor of 100X, without you having to do anything. That's the level of vaporware they are selling.
- RHSman2 9y ago
  Very few out of the box machine learning services work other than speech-to-text by the worlds greatest company in that field (google). It's not a case of roll your own but find companies that can help you deliver s solution to your specific problem. (That is my business) This is the absolute bullshit of Watson. What it could be is a series of very good datasets and then being able to build models (based on recipes) and deploy them. It's so unbelievably clunky though. And Bluemix? Urgh

chrisco255 9y ago

My team and I were able to build a pretty good chatbot with Watson two years ago. We used Google for speech-to-text, however, as we found IBM's to be behind in that area. We had to use a Node.js proxy with a couple libs to parse out some natural language features (like time)...but overall it worked pretty well. At the time, it was the only open system I knew of to write things like this. Today, of course, there's the Alexa API from Amazon and Microsoft's LUIS, which are probably vastly superior for this sort of thing.

iampims 9y ago

Their text to speech API is pretty decent and was the cheapest available until Amazon Polly.