IBM's Watson coming to a cell phone?

[mike123abc]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...zed-watson-in-16-billion-sales-push-tech.html

The challenge for IBM is overcoming the technical obstacles to making Watson a handheld product, and figuring out how to price and deliver it. Watson’s nerve center is 10 racks of IBM Power750 servers running in Yorktown Heights, New York, that have the same processing power as 6,000 desktop computers. Even though most of the computations occur at the data center, a Watson smartphone application would still consume too much power for it to be practical today.
Another hurdle: It takes a while for Watson to do the “machine learning” necessary to become a reliable assistant in an area. Watson’s deal with WellPoint (WLP) was announced in September of last year, and the system won’t master the field of oncology until at least late 2013.

Siri better stay in school, Watson is gunning for her.

Essentially they just keep shoveling in new topics and subjects into Watson until it becomes an expert in a field. It will be quite a feat if it masters oncology. It is interesting how they train it by feeding in the documents, then sample questions and answers and then keep coming up with variations of questions, correcting it when it is wrong until it "learns" a subject. They "complain" that it takes a while to master a subject like oncology taking 2 years... How many humans go through med school, specialize in oncology, and essentially master the field in 2 years? Once of course it is done it can be replicated.

Imagine having it available at your beck and call, like having an expert on anything available. I suspect it is more a a 10 year away item for the smartphone.