[incision]

Sounds like a very cool demo, but the optimism of some of these ideas is quaint.

If Watson is good enough at speech and context recognition to accomplish these things IBM can/will sell truckloads of Watson as a Service for the purpose of monitoring employees.

WaaS will read everyone's email and parse conversations recorded by their desktops and phones to identify people who are off-task, leaking information or talking about unions.

That's the sort of thing Executives care about it. When I set up email retention systems they were primarily interested in being exempt from journaling. When I set up physical security systems they wanted to be sure the executive board room cameras weren't mic'd and faced away from the main presentation area.

In practice, both systems were primarily used to keep tabs on employees - who was dumb enough to send an email to the news from work and who's leaving early.

This is how 'intelligent' systems will be used - electronic overseers with distributed eyes and ears - long before it's confined as a guest boardroom showpiece that gets tossed for suggesting the CXO get off his soapbox in a timely manner or correcting his knowingly incorrect assertions.

[wdewind]

And yet we have millions (literally) of companies who do not employ this type of monitoring, despite it being trivial from within google apps.

> WaaS will read everyone's email and parse conversations recorded by their desktops and phones to identify people who are off-task, leaking information or talking about unions.

This specifically is not a terribly difficult monitoring task. You don't need something like watson to do it. Again, already available, still not heavily deployed.

The truth is people mostly trust each other and don't do shit like that. At some places they will, but watson is not the enabler here.

[incision]

>'The truth is people mostly trust each other and don't do shit like that. At some places they will, but watson is not the enabler here.'

I'm not sure we're talking about the same things here?

Perhaps in the startup world that is common on HN things are small, lean and trusting enough that this sort of outlook is possible.

The context of the article, Executives at the sort of companies that buy IBM, they absolutely invest in monitoring and retention by choice or by law.

Where I'm sitting now we retain every email, voicemail and internal chat for tens of thousands of people and video from hundreds of cameras. We retain 100% of voice calls for some sections. People who deal with the public have all their calls recorded as well as their screens. Every meaningful door is operated with an access card.

The limiting factor on implementation of these things is not some non-specific altruism, it's money. Money for licensing, infrastructure and operations - it's not cheap, not close.

No, Watson is not the specific enabler for these things to happen as they clearly already do, but the sort of intelligent XaaS that Watson could be is exactly what would make these systems cheaper and more effective.

Responsiveness for specific categories could be determined on the fly leading to lower size of retention and operators/administrators could probably be eliminated entirely.

[wdewind]

My point is that the analysis of this data is not particularly cost prohibitive. If you want to take all the emails you have recorded and figure out if people are talking about unions you really really do not need something like Watson to do it. I'm not saying people are or are not recording this data, I'm saying they don't have an interest in really digging through it, and if they did they would without something like Watson.

TLDR: Watson has nothing to do with monitoring + retention.

[incision]

>'My point is that the analysis of this data is not particularly cost prohibitive. If you want to take all the emails you have recorded and figure out if people are talking about unions you really really do not need something like Watson to do it.'

Clearly, but for whatever reason you've decided that 'email' alone is relevant here, not the bits 'speech and context recognition' and 'parse conversations recorded by their desktops and phones' which are the obvious applications of something like Watson.

>'I'm saying they don't have an interest in really digging through it.'

My direct experience says you are simply uninformed about this.

>'if they did they would without something like Watson.'

Only in the context of the 'emails' strawman you've constructed above.

TLDR: You are missing or deliberately avoiding the point. Voice recording and analysis is already big business, but speech and speaker recognition are still lacking and context awareness is obviously dependent on both. That is the exactly the sort of thing that this article specifically demonstrates Watson as being excellent at.

[wdewind]

Why would people who are actively digging through phone calls not be digging through the relative low hanging fruit of emails? I'm thus using lack of interest in digging through emails as a proxy for lack of interest in this kind of analysis - is that unreasonable?

Edit: And to be clear: I'm not saying there isn't a market for this product, just that the concept that it would become the dystopian norm is a bit melodramatic.