[seem_2211]

IBM is a confusing one. For a while I was getting IBM powered blockchain ads coming through my Instagram feed, and I seem to remember stopping by their booth at Dreamforce a few years ago where Watson would help determine what candy they'd give you (or something like that). One thing I'd be interested to know is what they actually do vs. the marketing spin of what they do.

[pridkett]

I also used to work for Watson. It remains one of the best jobs I've had. There's a number of useful services available through Watson on the IBM Cloud. I'm a little biased toward Watson Assistant which can be nicely customized and integrated with other solutions to create some terrific customized virtual agents. You can also easily train natural language systems using Knowledge Studio.

[nfriedly]

I helped build that candy machine demo! It was admittedly kind of silly, but it was fun to do.

Sadly IBM has changed a lot and I ended up in a different role not too long after, and then leaving the company entirely a year or so later.

To answer your question, though, one of the things Watson actually did was pretty powerful speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines. Out of the box they were approaching the best in the business, and with some customisation they could beat any other solution available for purchase. It was also far easier to use in a web browser than any of the competition (I'm biased here - I wrote a lot of that code - but I don't believe I'm wrong.)

I really enjoyed working with that part of Watson.