IBM creating pocket-sized Watson in $16 billion sales push

This could make a great pay-per-package product. Matlab and Mathematica do this, for instance, by making easy-to-use statistical or signal processing packages by subfield.

To expand on the example in the article, taking this into an easier to use interface for people like medical professionals would be awesome. A friend of mine who worked in an ER told me Wikipedia is actually used quite frequently. A program that could intelligently parse medical documents could be a great next step. It doesn't need to make actual diagnoses, but to jog the memory, an intelligent "these symptoms are consistent with pneumonia, bronchitis, or whooping cough" would probably be well-used.

Or for double-checking contraindications at pharmacies. Or for advising lawyers about applicable case-law. Or for reminding me about relevant studies as I do literature searches. Cool.

Edit: I imagine this will draw some comparisons to Siri, or its factual backend, wolfram Alpha. While wolfram Alpha is pretty sweet, I imagine context-specific question-parsing and machine learning would be much more powerful here (although I suppose wolfram Alpha/Mathematica could get into that game, too).

So not actually a pocket-sized Watson, but a smartphone app that will connect to Watson. As long as you've got reliable internet access.

A: Watson, the best hamburger I've ever eaten. Q: Where is St. John's bar and grill?

It would be the RPN of voice activated assistants.

I got a bit annoyed when the article kept conflating 'power' with 'number of cpu cycles running in parallel to get an answer.' I can tell you that we are no where near having the compute pipeline of 10 racks of Power750 servers in a co-processor in a smartphone.