IBM’s Watson could turn into a super-smart personal assistant for mobile devices

Remember Watson, the supercomputer that won Jeopardy last year? Well, the crew at IBM is working on Watson 2.0, a mobile device personal assistant specifically for the finance and health care industries. The company is working with Nuance, a leader in voice recognition technology, to become a specialized, "supercharged" version of Apple's Siri.

In preparation for these new tasks, Watson has a lot to learn. The supercomputer has already forayed into the medical world, learning about cancer in a partnership with insurance company WellPoint. It's a time-consuming process to get Watson up to speed, but it's projected to be a cancer expert by 2013.

To have the full suite of features in a tool like Siri, Watson will need to have some of IBM's other technologies added into the mix, such as image recognition and location data. It may also need an extra-powerful battery to support all those smarts. The original Watson uses as much power as 6,000 desktop computers, not surprising for a machine that can access 66 million pages of books and websites per second. But the mobile version will be less of a power hog, according to Bernie Meyerson, IBM's vice president of innovation.

[Image credit: Clockready]

This article was written by Anna Washenko and originally appeared on Tecca

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