International Business Machines researchers spent four years developing Watson, the computer smart enough to beat the champions of the quiz show "Jeopardy!" Now they're trying to figure out how to get those capabilities into the phone in your pocket.
Bernie Meyerson, IBM vice president of innovation, envisions a voice-activated Watson that answers questions, like a supercharged version of Apple's Siri personal assistant. A farmer could stand in a field and ask his phone, "When should I plant my corn?" He would get a reply in seconds, based on location data, historical trends and scientific studies.
Finding additional uses for Watson is part of IBM's plan to tap new markets and boost revenue from business analytics to $16 billion by 2015. After mastering history and pop culture for its "Jeopardy!" appearance, the system is crunching financial information for
Citigroup Inc. and cancer data for WellPoint Inc. The next version, dubbed Watson 2.0, would be energy-efficient enough to work on smartphones and tablets.
"The power it takes to make Watson work is dropping down like a stone," Meyerson said. "One day, you will have ready access to an incredible engine with a world knowledge base."
Technical challenges
IBM expects to generate billions in sales by putting Watson to work in finance, health care, telecommunications and other areas. The computer, which 15 million people saw beat former "Jeopardy!" champions
Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, is the company's most high-profile product since it sold its personal-computer unit to Lenovo Group Ltd. seven years ago.
The challenge for IBM is overcoming the technical obstacles to making Watson a handheld product, and figuring out how to price and deliver it. Watson's nerve center is 10 racks of IBM Power750 servers running in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., that have the same processing power as 6,000 desktop computers. Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much power for it to be practical today.
Another hurdle: It takes a while for Watson to do the "machine learning" necessary to become a reliable assistant in an area. Watson's deal with WellPoint was announced in September, and the system won't master the field of oncology until at least late 2013.
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