IBM's Watson Predicts Apple Watch As Top Holiday Gift
If you’ve watched any YouTube videos lately, you might have learned that IBM’s Watson supercomputer is a big fan of Bob Dylan, even though the deep-learning machine can’t carry a tune.
Bah Dylan. PffT. Leonard Cohen is far superior, and if Watson was any sort of actual genius, he’d know that.
But we can also add the Apple Watch to Watson’s list of likes, as the wearable has topped the think-bot’s list of items trending this holiday.
These results come from a brand-new, free app that collects and analyzes customer sentiment from across the Internet.
The IBM Watson Trend app, which launched this week in the App Store, “distills the sentiment of tens of millions of online conversations by scouring 10,000 sources across social media sites, blogs, forums, comments, ratings and reviews,” IBM said in a press release.
If the app is actually what’s doing the aggregating (which doesn’t make any sense), and it’s only been on the market for less than a week, then its results aren’t particularly trustworthy just yet. And those results are this: On a 100-point scale “based on the number of mentions and the speed at which they are increasing,” Apple Watch is currently rated a full 100, making it the number-one most wanted gift item for this holiday season.
As far as electronic gadgets go, I guess that makes sense, as everything Apple makes — save for iPod and Apple TV — is a lot more expensive than the entry-level Apple Watch. However, when stockings come to stuffing, I have a feeling that those aforementioned little black boxes will probably outsell the wearable. (And I’m very interested in the iPad Pro’s numbers, because that’s my pick for Device of the Year — by a long shot.)
At any rate, Apple is primed to have a heck of a seasonal sales push, and I’m looking forward to what all that means for the future of this little doodad on my wrist.