[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.