

Each IBM Watson installation is a 10-rack supercomputer with a total of 2880 processor threads (90 Power7 CPUs clocked at 3.5GHz, each with eight cores, and each core with four threads). There is 16TB of RAM, and the entire thing is embarrassingly parallel — it can process 500 gigabytes of data per second. Watson runs IBM’s DeepQA software, which basically pores through millions of books and documents — dictionaries, encyclopedias, research papers, enws documents — and then uses that data to answer questions with remarkable speed and accuracy.

IBM Watson on Jeopardy, asking an inappropriate questionNow, don’t worry — IBM isn’t trying to shrink the room-sized Watson down to the size of a smartphone. Instead, we’re simply looking at a smartphone app that directly interfaces with an internet-connected Watson installation. It would work in a very similar way to Siri or Google Now, which both send your voice clip off to the cloud for processing.

In theory, Watson’s question answering ability would utterly blow Siri and Google Now out of the water, though. While Siri can set your alarms, Watson can parse a patient’s charts and provide clinical diagnoses and pharmaceutical prescriptions. Where Siri can tell you whether you’ll need an umbrella, you could ask Watson whether now is the right time to plant your crops — or for a complete walkthrough on how to fix your toaster.

As far as I can tell, IBM could roll out a Watson smartphone app today — if the company could work out how to price and deliver it. The problem with Watson is that it takes a long time to learn a given subject — and even after months of feeding data into Watson, it can still only answer questions that belong to that specific domain. The Watson that can diagnose cancer can’t answer questions about planting crops — you’d need a complete Watson installation just to answer agricultural queries. Considering each Watson costs around $3 million, that’s an expensive proposition.

A surgeon, armed with an IBM Watson smartphone app (not real)As a result, and given IBM’s business and enterprise expertise, the smartphone version of IBM Watson will almost certainly be a business app, rather than a consumer app. There’s always the possibility that, say, a mobile carrier buys an IBM Watson and then forwards the service to its customers. You can also foresee a future where Microsoft uses a Watson to provide excellent, instantaneous customer service to its customers.

Moving forward, IBM tells Bloomberg that the plan is to give Watson more “senses.” At the moment Watson can only respond to strings of text (i.e. typed in). Watson 2.0 (no ETA) will hopefully have voice recognition (courtesy of a partnership with Nuance, the company behind Siri’s voice recognition module), and image recognition — so instead of asking a question, Watson will simply interpret whatever your smartphone’s being pointed at, be it a broken toaster, an empty field, or a lump in your breast.

Read: IBM Watson to replace salespeople and cold-calling telemarketers and Watson to battle patent trolls