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Comment by pgeorgi | Hacker News Reader

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pgeorgi·

> allowing you to build a full Q&A/dialog application.

> If you have any questions, please fire up, the Watson team is ready to answer.

So that's what you built Watson for :-)

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We'd love to do an automated AMA. We are not yet there but if the community provided some training data I believe it's within reach. Give us a couple of years!

Is the Watson platform dependent on the hardware, or do you keep updating the hardware that it runs on?

Given that our strategy is to expose most Watson technology as cloud services we will keep updating the hardware underneath in a way that seamless to the user. We try to leverage the Power architecture as much as possible.

Thanks, that's what I had assumed, however seeing the hardware behind Watson on Jeopardy threw me off [1]. I'm guessing that that was just the first stage.

[1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/IBM-Watson.jpg

Yeah it was. At the risk of waxing about old history, when we demoed the first large vocabulary speech recognition system back in 1984 it ran on a bunch of IBM mainframes. Within two years it was running on a PC with some special purpose cards. Today much more powerful recognizers run locally on smartphones. We have always found we can shrink something down once we solve the basic problem, and it is important not to let computational limitations prevent you from seeing the best solution.

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