Need Your Own Mini Watson?

June 18, 2011

Tony Pearson at IBM’s developerWorks explains “IBM Watson—How to Build Your Own ‘Watson Jr.’ in Your Basement.” Well, if we can build Watson in our basement, why do we need IBM?

This famous innovation is uniquely positioned for copying. Unlike many other prototypes in the tech universe, Watson:

. . . was made mostly from commercially available hardware, software and information resources. As several have noted, the 1TB of data used to search for answers could fit on a single USB drive that you buy at your local computer store.

Pearson actually describes how to build what he calls “Watson Jr.”, a scaled down version of the Jeopardy-winning A.I. The servers for the original, though as efficient as possible, require a LOT of electricity. To make the project more manageable for hobbyists, this version sacrifices game strategy and search optimization and makes speech synthesis optional.

Step-by-step directions describe exactly how to develop your own little answer machine. You can put it right next to that Zenith STOL CH 801 airplane you built and could not get out of your workshop.

Cynthia Murrell June 18, 2011

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, News, Search, Semantic, Technology

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.