IBM Watson needs to be Alexa. Where is IBM Watson “Echo”

Many years ago I worked at IBM in New York as a co-op for a total of 18 months. It was a great experience and my first in the computing industry. My second cousin was a general manager of the San Jose IBM facility back in the 1980s and there was a possibility I would work there. However, I chose to go my own route as I was an entrepreneur at heart and not a corporate dude. I eventually co-founded InstallShield. While running InstallShield as a CTO I/we interacted with IBM a great deal on OS/2, Windows, and other related technologies. It was always a great experience albeit little red tape oriented.  They had great research groups working on cutting edge technologies.  I’ve always had a fondness for them.

Everyone is familiar with IBM Watson and the earlier IBM's Deep Blue in one form or another. The familiarity may be only hearing of the results on the news where the Deep Blue computer beat the chess grand-master Kasparov or IBM Watson winning at Jeopardy against the best human Jeopardy champion. These wins were amazing especially for computer science people and the teams who worked on those projects.  IBM Watson has also had a lot of press/commercials about solving various medical problems by assisting doctors and researchers. That's great and very important to be sure.

However, it is my opinion that IBM, who had probably the first really large publicly visible artificial intelligence engine is missing out by not having their own version of Amazon Echo. While maybe a step down in AI in some sense from what IBM Watson “says” they're doing now, it would enhance their public footprint by placing them in the forefront for both AI professionals and the public. Unfortunately, IBM is not shipping Watson nor have expressed the notion that they will be shipping a physical product that everyone can use. This is disappointing as they have the capacity to accomplish this and are in a deep struggle to compete in the artificial intelligence cloud service world.

For IBM to be a player in mass artificial intelligence cloud they need to be in the market with a device and not just the back end research that no one knows about.  Bring it on IBM.  With your logo, I can imagine some cool looking devices.

Let’s see a physical IBM Watson.