“Chef Watson is a secret weapon.”

That's how celebrity chef and restaurateur, Simon Gault, describes the impact of Chef Watson on cooking.

It was in 2012 when New York’s Institute of Culinary Education teamed up with IBM to create a virtual chef using Watson, an artificial intelligence engine.

The chemical compounds of thousands of foods were analysed by Watson and then it was put to work to understand why some flavours and ingredients complement each other and others don’t. Once its culinary database was ready, it was programmed to produce unique food combinations using whatever ingredients you have on hand. 

“You can extend your repertoire to different cuisines from different countries because it’s all in Chef Watson’s database,” says Gault.

Imagine you’re at home and you’re wondering what you want to cook for dinner. You open the fridge, see what you have, then access IBM Chef Watson.

You input chicken and gorgonzola and whatever else you have then bingo! Chef Watson will tell you a dish you could cook and the synergy of the ingredients.

“Does it replace the chef?” ponders Gault.

“No, because you still have to work out how you make the ingredients work together and still come up with a dish in your mind.”

Today, Chef Watson is changing the way we think about and food and expanding our knowledge of what the possibilities are for cooking, so can it do the same for businesses?

Using Watson To Unlock New Business Opportunities

“We've spent the last 50 years or so teaching people to operate computers. Cognitive computing is about teaching computers to understand people.” - Rob High, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, IBM Watson

Watson is creating a new partnership between people and computers that enhances, scales, and accelerates human expertise. Cognitive technology augments human expertise to unlock new intelligence from vast quantities of structured and unstructured data and to develop deep, predictive insights.

Cognitive applications interact with people in a natural way to answer questions and provide guidance to help people make decisions.

As you build cognitive applications, take advantage of these core strengths of Watson:

• Keep your critical information private and proprietary. Watson is the only model that does not require you to contribute your data to a central knowledge base.
• Use Watson’s deep sensory capabilities, including language, vision, and speech.
• Write applications that include emotional reasoning. Watson has both emotional and intellectual intelligence and can interpret emotion, tone, and personality.