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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

First of all, I figured out that there's no 'it'. It's a portfolio of products ranging from image recognition as a service to on premise NLP and enterprise search. All these products have their own specific use cases, some of them have hardly any real world use cases.

What I've recently been doing is using NLP for document classification. It's the type of problem you can solve with many different solutions, but 'Watson' is the one we're using.

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Unless I'm missing something here, "Watson" was definitely not positioned as a catalog of services when it famously played jeopardy.

That's the point being made; the "Watson" marketing and the "Watson" reality are at odds, but there is a Watson reality, even if it's more mundane than the marketing.

I rewrote my initial draft of that sentence to deny IBM their strategy of using Watson as a human name, which is part of the problem. You shouldn't really use a possessive on Watson, because nothing is Watson's as it isn't a person, grammatically or otherwise. Watson is a collective noun, which is a suite of products. Even if you nominally know better, it fools your brain if you let them frame Watson as a proper name of a person.

no, i guess it positioned itself as jeopardy-as-a-service

Sounds next gen.

They answered the question you asked, and contributed information to the thread. Don't snark in response to that.

I think it might have come across differently than intended. They are using it for something that doesn't seem to match the hype around Watson.

I think the NLP was what much of the hype was about though?

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