What Can Modern Watson Do?

Recently we wrote about how the'popular' Watson of Jeopardy fame still lingers in the memories of our non-data scientist colleagues and perhaps misleads them about the capabilities of AI. It's time we got in tune with the modern Watson, or more correctly IBM's Watson Group and its Watson platform and took a look at all there is to offer. There are three broad capabilities in today's AI and they are: Image and video processing: Largely driven by Convolutional Neural Nets (CNNs) this field has been getting most of the press with capabilities like facial and object recognition. Text and speech processing: This is generally known as Natural Language Processing (NLP), the capability to not only intake speech and text but to understand the nuanced context of strings of words, to perform search or translation on them, and output words and blocks of text and speech. Siri, Alexa, and Cortana represent examples of this field that used to be the butt of jokes but are now more than commercially acceptable. This field has been largely driven by Recurrent Neural Nets (RNNs).