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Watson and AI For Normal People

How about explaining Watson and AI for normal people — without the jargon?

Daniel Toczala
9 min readSep 15, 2022
Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

I‘ve been working with Watson and AI for a long time now — and one thing I constantly hear from my customers is that they just don’t “get” this whole AI thing. I will then explain things to them in simple ways, without a lot of terminology and with real-life examples, and they will thank me. Some of them even ask me, why doesn’t someone just explain things like this in the first place? So….. let’s try to do that here.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a service that will take regular “natural” language, and process it for understanding. With our reliance on search engines, we often fall into the trap of doing “keyword slams” to find what we need via online search engines. We just slap a lot of key phrases and words together, and hope for the best. So I might Google “toczala watson articles”, rather than typing, “Can I see a list of articles on Watson and AI by someone named Toczala?” What NLP does, is allow us to speak and write naturally, just the way that you are reading these words.

I cover NLP first because it is a foundational capability that gets used by many of the other Watson services. NLP processes written words, and…

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Daniel Toczala
Daniel Toczala

Written by Daniel Toczala

I am a Subject Matter Expert for AI at IBM. The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s position, strategies or opinions.

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