IBM’s Watson edges out students in Jeopardy - barely

Watson is actually a stack of 90 powerful IBM server computers housed at the company’s Yorktown Heights, N.Y., lab, represented at yesterday’s event by a video screen and a digital voice. Its vast memory contains the equivalent of a million books. More important, its software is capable of recognizing the subtle concepts buried in everyday human speech and writing.

The result, said Ferrucci, is a computer that can comprehend documents that would once have been meaningless to a machine. Armed with this knowledge, Watson can provide vital decision support for workers who must make complex, difficult choices, like a doctor prescribing treatment or a financial planner working up an investment strategy.

“Where you see decision-making based on large volumes of natural language content,’’ said Ferrucci, “this is an opportunity for this class of technology.’’

In a Jeopardy game, Watson gives only one answer - usually the right one. In yesterday’s match, the computer never gave an incorrect answer.

In real-world settings, a Watson-like system would give a user several possible answers, leaving the final decision to a human. But since Watson searches millions of documents, it will base its suggestions on far more data than any person can access.

“What humans do you know who can fit millions of books in their head?’’ Ferrucci said. “That’s what we want to do ultimately with this technology.’’

Nuance Communications Inc., of Burlington, made some of the software behind another voice-recognition system that made a splash this year: Siri, the spoken-command assistant used in the iPhone 4S, the latest generation of Apple Inc.’s popular smartphone.