Want To Be As Smart As Watson? Now You Can Rent A Slice Of IBM's Big Brain

Watson made a name for itself when IBM paraded the artificially intelligent computer system on Jeopardy and pitted it against the game show's two biggest winners of all-time -- Ken Jennings, who holds the record for the longest winning streak, and Brad Rutter, the all-time money winner. The supercomputer vanquished its human and flesh opponents, but more importantly, it introduced the world to IBM's impressive technology. Oh, and by the way, you can tap into that big brain of Watson's, for a price.

IBM announced that Watson Analystics, a breakthrough natural language-based cognitive service that can provide instant access to powerful predictive and visual analytic tools for businesses, is available to rent in beta form.


"IBM Watson Analytics automates the once time-consuming tasks such as data preparation, predictive analysis, and visual storytelling for business professionals. Offered as a cloud-based freemium service, all business users can now access Watson Analytics from any desktop or mobile device," IBM said.

More than 22,000 people have already registered for the beta, which provides business professionals with a unified experience and natural language dialogue to better understand data. The example IBM gave is that of a marketing, HR, or sales rep being able to quickly source data, refine it, discover insights, predict outcomes, create reports, and more.