The future of Watson
Over the years, the Watson brand has taken on several meanings. In the beginning, we all knew Watson as the machine that competed against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on the US TV game show, Jeopardy!. This single event brought more attention to the reawakening of AI than almost any other previous event. It made people across the globe realize that AI had the potential of having a profound impact on our lives. If you're interested in learning more about this project and the significance of the problem that Watson was solving, we highly recommend that you read, Final Jeopardy: The Story of Watson, the Computer That Will Transform Our World by Stephan Baker (ISBN-13: 978-0547747194).
Since then, the core functionalities that made up this project were transformed into a set of services available as cloud APIs—which are the primary focus of this book. However, not long after, IBM created a separate business unit to advance the application of these AI technologies within the...