The holiday shopping season is upon us and that means having to decide what gifts to get for our family, friends and colleagues. It’s not the easiest of tasks since it involves a lot of thought, making sure that the gifts we buy are relevant enough and obviously there’s always the budget consideration. The IBM Watson supercomputer aims to at least take out some of the pain that we have all experienced with holiday shopping.
IBM has released a new application today called Watson Trend, the app taps into the supercomputer and analyzes trends to let you know which gifts and toys are trending and therefore are most popular this holiday season.
Watson Trend has only been released for iOS right now, it will provide gift suggestions in a few categories which include tech, health and toys. It will surface products which it believes to be the most popular in each category. The app will also predict trends to let you know whether a particular item will be popular throughout the holiday season or if it’s only popular for a short time.
To make all of these predictions the supercomputer is analyzing conversations about products on social media, blogs, comments, ratings and reviews for products behind the scenes. It does allow users to study the “story behind the trend” in which Watson explains why it thinks a particular product is trending.
Even if you don’t always agree with its suggestions, Watson could prove to be a useful helper as you decide what to get for the people closest to you, and it helps that the app is free.