How to Talk to IBM's Watson Supercomputer

In 2011, IBM stole the artificial intelligence show when Watson, a talking cognitive computer, won Jeopardy! By feeding the computer millions of pages of unstructured data -- that is to say, no numbers or values neatly organized in spreadsheets -- the company "taught" Watson everything he needed to thoroughly whack human Jeopardy! For the first time ever, a computer with some sense of understanding of the world was not only on display, it was on television. At present, some 80,000 developers and 500 businesses are using this cloud to create the next generation of smart apps that can make use of language, speech, vision, and data that seem sure to become powerful, useful pieces of software. It's as though we are sitting on the precipice of a time when it will become easy -- perhaps even boring -- to speak to your computer as you might speak to a coworker, and to have that speech turned into useful action.