IBM gives Slack developers access to its Watson Conversation API

This might be the fault of IBM's marketing, but it's completely unclear to me what the Watson API actually is.

From the documentation, it seems to be a suite of algorithms which do standard NLP tasks, such sentiment analysis, topic modeling, translation etc. That, with a sprinkling of some rather odd and dubious machine learning, like "personality insights".

Yet it is marketed as an expert-system of sorts, capable of mining large amounts of data and doing intelligent question answering, kinda like what we were promised with expert systems 15 years ago.

There's a big gap between what these two things are, and I've seen nothing which bridges this gap. Clearly they're doing something interesting - IBM Watson's Jeopardy AI is a pretty serious bit of work. But the APIs don't seem to expose anything remotely resembling the Watson which got all that publicity a few years ago.