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IBM's Watson Now A Customer Service Agent, Coming To Smartphones Soon
- DoubleMalt 13y agoBig Mistake! After a couple of weeks at the Helldesk he will inevitably turn against humanity! Judgement Day is near!
- aurelianito 13y agoThis article reminded my of the game Singularity (http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/). We are in the menial tasks stage of the game.
- trekky1700 13y agoPoor Watson, fame really must have taken its toll. From Jeopardy winner to Help Desk agent, I can only assume a life of drugs and alcohol led to this.
- jksmith 13y agoHeh well, small beginnings lead to replacing staff lawyers and some doctor functions. Dr Watson, Esquire
- tocomment 13y agoWatson seemed so impressive on Jeopardy. I don't understand why they work on making it into a general search engine. It would be much better than google. Or even a restricted search engine that can read all of the papers on a given topic and then answer questions from those papers.
- jmduke 13y agoMy guess: Watson doesn't scale. The required resources to answer a given question is reasonable for a "question-every-minute" format like Jeopardy, but not something like thousands of questions a second.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoSounds like a caching layer would solve that problem.
- JamesArgo 13y agoIt runs on a 20-80 teraflop computer and is not amendable to GPGPU acceleration. Perhaps that's why it doesn't scale.
- jonknee 13y agoIt seems more like a (better) version of Wolfram Alpha than a general search engine.
- ippisl 13y agothis way they get more revenues. see, just the customer service in us is $150 billion market .what about global customer service?what about doctors,lawyers ,or every other type of knowledge worker ? if Watson is as good as ibm claims, all those people would pay alot of money to use it. on the other hand ,all of the search engine market is less than $150 billion per yer,probably much less. and not fighting with Google is also a great bonus.
- ilaksh 13y agoGoogle is working on making a general search engine like Watson. I wouldn't be surprised if they even recruited someone who worked on Watson.
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoWhile this will be a boon for consumers(24 hour, mostly-competent service in English), I feel bad for the coming wave of knowledge workers who will be eschewed in favor of technology like this, much like the factory workers who lost their jobs in the 90s and 2000s to either outsourcing or automation. Unfortunately for these workers, there will be next to no recourse like the somewhat limited recourse for manufacturing employees like there is today, in fields like design, automation, robotics and advanced manufacturing in general.
- droopyEyelids 13y agoI think it's time for this issue to move to the front of our minds. So much technological innovation has turned computers into workers that compete for low level jobs. Huge swaths of the economy no longer support human life, and with every advance the future looks worse for taxi drivers, farm workers, etc. I believe it's time to start thinking how we can create jobs with technology. Creating new industries that will use computers to enable human beings to do jobs they couldn't before. Groupon did an OK job of that, creating positions for 10k people, doing a form of sales no one had conceptualized before. But I think in time we can do much better than sales jobs. Groupon was still developed to send investors further into the stratosphere, it just uses people in a way that makes them hard to dispose of, and needed in quantity. While that seriously rules, I believe the idealistic goal of growing an organization that treats employees as 1st class citizens, rather than clueless investor carrying mules is fully possible.
- phreeza 13y agoI always wonder if this conundrum is not really more of an opportunity than a problem. Maybe its time we stopped believing everybody must have a job, and restructure our societies in ways that reflect that we can now get along just fine with a significant portion of society not being forced to work?
- salemh 13y agoHow is this going to work out legally/politically? Its a good notion, and a lot of good discussion exists on HN for merits/etc.. Can you fathom any sort of political debate on moving towards such a thing in the US (being US centric here, but perhaps certain EU countries would fare better). Notwithstanding this somewhat exists by way of "welfare" programs and their like, and yet those are continually disparaged/hot-button topics which typically move nowhere in any type of reform (expansion or contraction).
- avens19 13y agoOn a side note: the question they feature in the article, holy crap is tuition getting beyond ridiculous in the US. I thought Canada was getting more than high enough
- alxbrun 13y agoI don't think it will work. Watson roughly works this way (of course it's much more sophisticated than that): 1- Identify the type of entity of the answer (does the question start with "who" ? or "when" ? etc. 2- Gather as many facts and blobs related to the question from Wikipedia, etc. 3- Intersect these facts with the entity type, and answer. I don't believe you can provide useful customer service with that. 90% of the times, customers complain about something wrong with their account, like Paypal holding a payment. They don't need or expect fact-based answers like the ones Watson knows how to answer.
- sp332 13y agoWatson doesn't deal in "blobs" of information. It has a semantic structure that holds all its data. When you ask for a piece of data, it understands the context of your question and the connections among all the parts of your query.
- alxbrun 13y agoSo, do you think it will help Watson be a good customer service agent ? PS. Each time I read that a computer "understands" human language, I have a good laugh.
- bsaul 13y agoDoes anyone has a video or a link showing in details the work of watson in medical diagnostic ? I've always read about that kind of stuff happening, but never a real case study or anything concrete (such as : doctor thought it could be that type of cancer, but watson thought of something else because of this and this...)