Watson and other proprietary programs have also suffered from competition with free ‘open source’ programs provided by some vendors, such as Google's TensorFlow.
More recently, IBM's Watson has received considerable attention in the media for its focus on precision medicine, particularly cancer diagnosis and treatment. Watson employs a combination of machine learning and NLP capabilities. However, early enthusiasm for this application of the technology has faded as customers realised the difficulty of teaching Watson how to address particular types of cancer 9 and of integrating Watson into care processes and systems. 10 Watson is not a single product but a set of ‘cognitive services’ provided through application programming interfaces (APIs), including speech and language, vision, and machine learning-based data-analysis programs. Most observers feel that the Watson APIs are technically capable, but taking on cancer treatment was an overly ambitious objective. Watson and other proprietary programs have also suffered from competition with free ‘open source’ programs provided by some vendors, such as Google's TensorFlow.