IBM is following its own best practice as it moves the “cognitive computing” tools and resources that comprises Jeopardy-winning Watson into a developer-accessible, cloud-based resource. For readers who don’t recognize the reference, IBM’s Watson (with a human-like text-to-speech front end from Nuance) became a Jeopardy fan favorite as it defeated the two winningest contestants in the history of the game show. Since that time, IBM has continued to make significant investments in Watson, but the big news is that now it is ready to share those resources with a broad community of application and service developers through what it calls the “Watson Developer Cloud.”

Think of it as an “Instant Ecosystem.” It has already announced a set of initial partners that span retailing (Fluid Inc.); healthcare (MD Buyline, Welltok, Healthline), and the community of creative independent developers (eLance). These folks are provided with access to IBM’s core technology and development tools, but they will also benefit from the strength of globally-recognized brand and considerable largesse when it comes to marketing and support. It’s a win/win situation whereby partners bring their domain knowledge and creative ideas and everyone benefits from the investment that IBM has put into Watson over the past several years. Most importantly is the underlying “Content Store,” a knowledge-based in the cloud that is an aggregation of information and data from a multiplicity of sources. As IBM puts it in a background piece, the Content Store contains “general knowledge, industry specific content, and subject matter expertise to inform, educate, and help create an actionable experience for the user.”

If you’re looking for a definition of Big Data, there you have it. I personally don’t like the use of the term “actionable” because the first definition in many dictionaries is “grounds for a lawsuit”). The good news is that a second definition, “having practical value,” is more to the point. IBM recognizes that the value of  computers systems that understand an individual’s intent (whether spoken or keyed it into a form or search box) will be its ability to help people solve problems. It is interesting that there is so much focus on healthcare in the near-term. That is turning out to be a very crowded field. It is gratifying to see that a retailing specialist is also among the initial partners. But in the long-run, “Powered by IBM Watson” is destined to permeate a wide spectrum of both mobile and Web-based commerce.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: IBM, Cloud-based services, personal virtual assistants, cognitive computing, Watson