IBM is Working to Create a Pocket-Sized mini Watson

IBM’s dreams of creating a version of Watson that is voice activated and will answer questions a whole lot better than Siri, the voice activated personal assistant created by Apple. Watson will provide educated answers based on historical trends, scientific studies and location data.

For those who are not familiar with Watson, it is the IBM AI program that had beaten human Champions at the popular TV show Jeopardy, last year. Watson 2.0, the next version of the product, will be designed to run on tablets and smart phones.

There are still some technical difficulties that must be overcome before IBM can make Watson a hand held product. Though many of the computations occur in a data center, the application still consumes too much server power to run on a smart phone device. A lot of time is needed in order for Watson to do the necessary machine learning in order for it to become reliable enough to provide assistance in a particular area. Furthermore, voice and image recognition needs to be added for the application to be responsive to real live input.