Watson wins Jeopardy! — Siri launched

AI enters the living room

In February 2011, IBM's Watson computer system competed against the two greatest Jeopardy! champions of all time — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — in a three-episode special broadcast. Watson won convincingly, earning $77,147 against Jennings' $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600. The prize money was donated to charity. In October of the same year, Apple launched Siri with the iPhone 4S — the first voice assistant integrated into a mainstream consumer device.

How Watson worked

Watson was not a search engine or a database lookup system. It used a combination of natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, and machine learning to analyze Jeopardy! clues — often formulated as wordplay, metaphors, and indirect references — and generate confident answers in milliseconds. Watson processed the equivalent of one million books stored in its memory. It had no internet connection during the match.

Siri: AI in your pocket

While Watson demonstrated the power of AI in a controlled setting, Siri brought a form of AI to hundreds of millions of people. Siri was originally developed at SRI International as a DARPA-funded project, then acquired by Apple in 2010. It could answer questions, set reminders, send messages, and perform searches using natural language. For most consumers, it was their first real interaction with AI — even if Siri's capabilities were limited and often frustrating. It paved the way for Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and ultimately the much more capable large language models.

Sources

• Ferrucci, D. et al. (2010). Building Watson: An Overview of the DeepQA Project. AI Magazine, 31(3), 59–79.
• Wikipedia — Watson
• Wikipedia — Siri