5 Things You Need to Know About IBM’s Watson Analytics

If you want to get ahead of the competition, resorting to a business analytics tool to get a comprehensive review of your data could be your best option. Watson Analytics, IBM’s latest cloud analytics program, provides you ways to make business decisions better than ever.

According to their product presentation, Watson is available for anyone who wishes to use predictive analytics to get an objective and data-driven foresight of their business. Smart analytics tools such as Watson:

• allows anyone who doesn’t have an in-depth IT knowledge to explore the data juiced from various, credible sources with ease;

• enables you to use natural language in processing and gathering relevant answers; and

• lets you assemble an objective that makes a great guide for your business development plan.

Now we know that Watson Analytics gives us a comprehensive presentation of data, does it stop there? Not necessarily. Here are some additional things you need to know about Watson and what it can do for businesses and technology in general:

1. Watson is a huge step ahead of Siri and Google Now

IBM has worked its way to successfully engage Watson into the mainstream. We all know what Siri does; it is a voice-prompted mobile personal assistant that could answer all kinds of questions by sifting all the information available through the Internet. The same idea was used for Google Now. IBM has created a big leap ahead of these two technologies.

A product of extensive research, the version of Watson that won in “Jeopardy!” is the line that separates it from Siri or Google Now. The goal is to make the software respond to inquiries delivered in natural language. However, the said version is just for a specific type of user and only for one question at a time. But now, Watson is much more than that. Recent innovations of Watson allows you to sort through information, present infographics and charts, and predict insights.

2. The latest version of Watson is improved by beta testers

No one understand the needs of the users best but themselves. IBM has clung to this idea to create user-friendly and functional features to make your experience easy and productive. According to Thomas Dong of Watson Analytics, beta users have been constantly suggesting improvements that has made Watson into what it is today.

3. Watson was developed through interaction with experts

Since the goal of creating Watson was for it to become responsive to natural language, creators ushered in a new wave of cognitive computing. Earlier tools in the early 19th Century such as tabulating  and programming in the recent years allowed Artificial Intelligence to gradually prosper. However, the creators of Watson deviated from the rules to mimic natural human language.

Stephen Gold, IBM Watson Solutions vice president said that Watson is loaded with tools that help it comprehend content as how a person would understand it.

4. Predictive Analytics are at work in Watsons

Watson is designed to perform predictive analytics based on the data you want to achieve. IBM describes Watson as a database that provides probabilistic responses out of the series of data. In Jeopardy!, the way IBM selects answers is shown. It answers according to confidence levels in a series of probable correct responses.

Since people aren’t very good at probabilities, Watson makes a very good partner in decision making. Watson performs probability techniques which might be new to you, and gives a fresh way of looking at the success rates of your hypotheses.

5. Cloud-based applications is Watson’s greatest strength.

Since its victory over its human opponents in the game show Jeopardy!, further innovations are at work to make Watson useful in different industries such as healthcare and finance. Watson’s developer cloud expanded the coverage by providing data from free and paid content from least 500 talent hubs that provide more data to be stored into the system.

IBM has partnered with third parties to support machine learning and natural language processing developments, interface design, and other elements used in improving the application.

Watson looks into billions of information and presents an insight about it in seconds in a single inquiry. To sort out massive information and create a presentable report out of it in very little time is something that your business can truly benefit from.