If you’ve watched any YouTube videos lately, you might have learned that IBM’s Watson supercomputer is a big fan of Bob Dylan, even though the deep-learning machine can’t carry a tune. But we can also add the Apple Watch to Watson’s list of likes, as the wearable has topped the think-bot’s list of items trending this holiday.
These results come from a brand-new, free app that collects and analyzes customer sentiment from across the Internet.
The IBM Watson Trend app, which launched this week in the App Store, “distills the sentiment of tens of millions of online conversations by scouring 10,000 sources across social media sites, blogs, forums, comments, ratings and reviews,” IBM said in a press release.
So, similar to that study we talked about earlier, Watson’s including context and interpreting customer attitudes and intent to buy. But it’s doing so on a huge level.
Watson Trend scores items daily on a scale of 0 to 100 based on the number of mentions and the speed at which they are increasing. Apple Watch currently holds a top score of 100, while iMacs rate 21 and the iPhone 6s snags a 4. As of this writing, the top five items under the app’s Tech heading (it also has Toys and Health categories) are Apple Watch, Samsung TVs, Sony TVs, Canon cameras, and Nikon cameras. Apple-owned Beats by Dre headphones are in the seventh spot with a score of 22. The only other smartwatch to appear on the list is the Pebble Time.
Once again, it’s looking like Apple Watch is set to have a solid holiday season, and the company’s increased support for the devices with the recently updated watchOS 2 and official accessories like a first-party charger suggests that it has been planning for this since the device launched in April.
Are you giving (or expecting) an Apple Watch this holiday? Let us know in the comments. Watson could probably use the material.
