Watson was built to understand the human language, to examine and test hypotheses in scientists' data along with the data in millions of scientific papers found in public database. The computer system is being used by scientists from universities, commercial research centers and pharmaceutical companies.
Although early adopters have been trying it out already, the service is officially available from today, said the vice president of IBM's Watson Healthcare Group, Rob Merkel. He did not talk about the cost of the service. Watson became quite popular back in 2011 when it defeated the Jeopardy champions in a man-vs-machine special episode of the question-and-answer game show.
Some analysts even called it the biggest computing advancement in past several years. Watson is different from other supercomputers because along with the ability to make calculations, it can converse with humans, answer questions asked verbally and is beginning to understand jokes and colloquialism.
According to Merkel, its natural language ability makes it good for scientific research. "It's about understanding human language, scientific language and images, It could be used anywhere where huge bodies of information need to analysed? he said.
Using Watson as a cloud service is a great idea for commercial research houses or universities, says Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor insights and Strategy. He added "Going with software-as-a-service lets you try it out, lowering the risk of bringing infrastructure in-house before you test it. This is a good way for universities and pharmaceutical companies to kick the tires and see if Watson does bring value and if it works at scale. Meaning if they would do a lot of work on it, possibly they would bring it in house."
Moorhead believes this thing will be good for IBM which will be able to sell more systems like Watson.
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