[1] It was developed as a part of IBM's DeepQA project by a research team, led by principal investigator David Ferrucci.

[citation needed] Watson uses IBM's DeepQA software and the Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) framework implementation.

[15] IBM master inventor and senior consultant Tony Pearson estimated Watson's hardware cost at about three million dollars.

[18] The IBM team provided Watson with millions of documents, including dictionaries, encyclopedias and other reference material, that it could use to build its knowledge.

[19] However, Watson has consistently better reaction time on the buzzer once it has generated a response, and is immune to human players' psychological tactics, such as jumping between categories on every clue.

[19][23] In a sequence of 20 mock games of Jeopardy!, human participants were able to use the six to seven seconds that Watson needed to hear the clue and decide whether to signal for responding.

contest was the electronic circuitry that receives the "ready" signal and then examines whether Watson's confidence level was great enough to activate the buzzer.

Though he initially had trouble finding any research staff willing to take on what looked to be a much more complex challenge than the wordless game of chess, eventually David Ferrucci took him up on the offer.

[31][32][33] To compete successfully on Jeopardy!, Watson would need to respond in no more than a few seconds, and at that time, the problems posed by the game show were deemed to be impossible to solve.

[19] In initial tests run during 2006 by David Ferrucci, the senior manager of IBM's Semantic Analysis and Integration department, Watson was given 500 clues from past Jeopardy!

[36] During the game, Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage[11] including the full text of the 2011 edition of Wikipedia,[37] but was not connected to the Internet.

Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.

[21] IBM repeatedly expressed concerns that the show's writers would exploit Watson's cognitive deficiencies when writing the clues, thereby turning the game into a Turing test.

Ken Jennings noted, "If you're trying to win on the show, the buzzer is all", and that Watson "can knock out a microsecond-precise buzz every single time with little or no variation.

[44] To provide a physical presence in the televised games, Watson was represented by an "avatar" of a globe, inspired by the IBM "smarter planet" symbol.

[45] Joshua Davis, the artist who designed the avatar for the project, explained to Stephen Baker that there are 36 trigger-able states that Watson was able to use throughout the game to show its confidence in responding to a clue correctly; he had hoped to be able to find forty-two, to add another level to the Hitchhiker's Guide reference, but he was unable to pinpoint enough game states.

[57] Eric Nyberg, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the development team, stated that the error occurred because Watson does not possess the comparative knowledge to discard that potential response as not viable.

[66][67] Jennings later wrote an article for Slate, in which he stated: IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek.

The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson.

Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of 'thinking' machines.

[19] Commentator Rick Merritt said that "there's another really important reason why it is strategic for IBM to be seen very broadly by the American public as a company that can tackle tough computer problems.

The winners were Majestyk Apps with their adaptive educational platform, FANG (Friendly Anthropomorphic Networked Genome);[80][81] Red Ant with their retail sales trainer;[82] and GenieMD[83] with their medical recommendation service.

Using software built by IBM and Influential, Condé Nast's clients will be able to know which influencer's demographics, personality traits and more best align with a marketer and the audience it is targeting.

[94] In healthcare, Watson has been used to analyze medical data and assist doctors in making diagnoses and treatment decisions, including in areas such as oncology and radiology.

[99] In February 2011, it was announced that IBM would be partnering with Nuance Communications for a research project to develop a commercial product during the next 18 to 24 months, designed to exploit Watson's clinical decision support capabilities.

[100] In September 2011, IBM and WellPoint (now Anthem) announced a partnership to utilize Watson to help suggest treatment options to physicians.

The company has sent Watson to the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University, where it will increase its health expertise and assist medical professionals in treating patients.

[113] By 2022, IBM Watson Health was generating about a billion dollars in annual gross revenue,[114] but was facing a lack of profitability and increased competition.

[117] On January 9, 2014, IBM announced it was creating a business unit around Watson, led by senior vice president Michael Rhodin.

[126][127] In its partnership with Pearson, Watson is being made available inside electronic text books to provide natural language, one-on-one tutoring to students on the reading material.