IBM Wants To Put A Supercomputer in Your Pocket: Enter Watson, the App

IBM's Watson supercomputing platform gets around. Its most famous appearance was on Jeopardy, where it trounced the two greatest Jeopardy players of all time by correctly (most of the time) answering questions about history and a number of other subjects. Watson wasn't designed for game shows, however, and has gone on to do number crunching chores for Citigroup and assist WellGroup with providing doctors with treatment options based on mountains of data. The next version of Watson could end up on your smartphone.

"The power it takes to make Watson work is dropping down like a stone," Bernie Meyerson, IBM's vice president of innovation, told Bloomberg in an interview. "One day, you will have ready access to an incredible engine with a world knowledge base."


Watson 2.0, as it's being called, would have voice and image recognition built-in, allowing a mobile app to respond to user input. Katherine Frase, vice president of industry research at IBM in Armonk, New York, suggested a scenario where a person could speak to the app and say, "Here's where I am and here's what I see," then lifting up the smartphone.

It would be like Siri, only much better and able to answer more complex questions. Siri is sometimes easily stumped, and Watson, in theory, wouldn't be.