I majored in English, a notoriously difficult skill set to commercialize. (But since nothing will come of nothing, I do try to shoehorn in gratuitous Shakespeare references on this blog wherever possible.) And so I can sympathize with the plight of IBM’s Watson. You train and train and train for one thing: to be “Jeopardy!” champion of the world. And then what?
IBM’s Bernie Meyerson, the company’s vice president of innovation, tells Bloomberg that Watson’s future home may not be on your television, in front of Alex Trebek, but rather in your pocket. In fact, Meyerson thinks Watson could be the germ of a Siri-like assistant that out-Siri’s Siri (see “Getting Your Phone to Give You a Hand”).
Watson’s already making decent money, actually, in the enterprise market (that is, working for businesses, rather than consumers). Like a B.A. with a humanities degree flung into the real world, Watson has set aside its useless command of history and culture and has settled for a job in consulting, doing remunerative calculations of various sorts for Citigroup Inc. and for WellPoint Inc. (financial data for the former, cancer data for the latter). The main reason Watson isn’t already in our pockets, said Meyerson, is that he’s simply too smart--it takes more power to tap his brain than our smartphone batteries can currently muster. But the amount of power required is “dropping down like a stone,” said Meyerson. “One day, you will have ready access to an incredible engine with a world knowledge base.”
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