Watson and Siri: The Rise of The Bi Smart Machine

(Part One)

ARTICLE REVIEW

Review of Troy Hiltbrand's "Watson and Siri: The Rise of the BI Smart Machine"

Citation: Hiltbrand, T. (2014). Watson and Siri: The Rise of the BI Smart Machine. Business Intelligence, Journal • vol. 19, no. 1 p. 23

The author Troy Hiltbrand, a technology strategist for Idaho National Laboratory, sheds light on an emerging trend of smart machines in the field of business intelligence. Hiltbrand believes that this trend has the potential to fundamentally alter the business industry we know it. He takes a well-articulated approach to explaining; when smart systems emerged, how they evolved and what are the possibilities of advancing human-computer interaction in the field of business intelligence. that will change the way end users interact with computational processing.

As suggested by the title, the authors writes about two of the most prominent knowledgebase systems (first of its kind), in support of his proposition. In the first section, Hiltbrad talks about the game show Jeopardy (a trivial competition), that inspired IBM researchers to create a computer that could outdo a human mind. He then Introduces Watson, a cognitive technology developed by IBM developer, to challenge the cognitive ability of a human brain. According to the article, Alex Trebek (the host of the competition), indicated this match between Watson and the two most successful champions to ever compete in Jeopardy (Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings), to be a "historic competition". Watson preceded to win the challenge on February 2011.

The Article then discusses another incidence where a computer was set against the human mind.  In 1997 IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue faced off with Garry Kasparov, (chess grandmaster) in which Deep Blue was able to defeat Kasparov. Hiltbrad's goes on to compare the capabilities  between Watson and Deep Blue, giving the advantages to Watson, primarily due to it's natural voice recognition ability.

The author discuss, Apple's Siri in the second half of the article, as a highly sophisticated technology that brought artificial intelligence into the palm of every customer. Hiltbrad drew an indirect comparison between, Watson and Siri in terms of size and portability. Although, Watson is much more powerful than Siri but due to its large size, its usage is limited. Whereas Siri, with its limited power, provided greater numbers of users the ability to easily interact with the machine on a daily basis.  

The author goes on to emphasize the need of using natural language recognition and cognitive systems, to facilitate the decision making process in business intelligence. Hiltbrad invasions the future technology to have, Watson power of computation and Siri's flexibly and portability along with the language recognition features, which will not only help bridge the learning and training gap between humans  and computers but significantly speed up the decision making process, in a time sensitive, business environment.