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IBM Watson Explorer pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

4.2 out of 5

10 reviews
100% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

IBM Watson Explorer enables users to integrate information for insightful analysis with AI-powered capabilities that reveal hidden data relationships. It aggregates diverse sources, offering contextual insights. Users value its data entity recognition and natural language cognitive feedback. However, its complexity, lack of language support, and stability issues pose challenges, especially for small businesses with limited resources. Users need to adapt workflows to manage Watson effectively, suggesting the need for a community edition.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM Watson Explorer allows users to easily pull together various pieces of information and analyze them more intelligently than other analytics tools.

Its AI, deep learning, and machine learning capabilities help uncover relationships and insights that users might not spot independently.

Watson Explorer is valuable for ingesting and retrieving information from different sources, providing context-aware answers to questions.

The tool enables users to extract unseen insights from unstructured data through its data entity features and cognitive feedback from Watson APIs.

Auto-generated documents and highlighted main keywords greatly enhance search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer.

CONS

Much of IBM operates with sets of tools in the middleware space, making it the customer's responsibility to develop complete solutions using that middleware.

Small businesses may find it challenging to adopt due to limited resources in terms of finances and time.

There is a learning curve in training Watson and understanding the workflow, including importing, exporting, and dictionary management.

IBM Watson Explorer requires expert setup due to its lack of stability, demanding knowledgeable personnel to maintain it.

The cost is high, making it expensive for some users.

IBM Watson Explorer Pros review quotes

Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 23, 2020

I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer.

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Devops Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 27, 2018

I really can't talk enough about the team.

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Technical Director at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Mar 27, 2018

The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data.

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IBM Watson Explorer

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Product Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Mar 27, 2018

What impressed me more about Watson is that it is easy to use it, not for the technical people, but for business people.

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Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 27, 2018

Implementing the solution really helped with manual labor, it takes care of a lot of FT work.

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Sales Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 27, 2018

We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data.

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Head of Commercialization at Woodside Energy

Mar 27, 2018

For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them.

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Architect at Rakuten

Mar 27, 2018

The main use case is FAQ for the user; it works for almost 80% of the use case coverage.

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Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 27, 2018

IBM has been working with Bradesco since 1968, I think, and the support is very good, with a team of 10 IBM employees working every day, 24 hours, inside the bank in Sao Paolo.

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President at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Mar 27, 2018

The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own.

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IBM Watson Explorer Cons review quotes

Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 23, 2020

The solution is expensive.

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Devops Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 27, 2018

It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary

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Technical Director at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Mar 27, 2018

It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface.

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IBM Watson Explorer

Free Report: IBM Watson Explorer Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM Watson Explorer. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2026.

893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Product Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Mar 27, 2018

We haven't used it in production yet so I can't answer this.

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Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 27, 2018

I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good.

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Sales Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Mar 27, 2018

More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform.

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Head of Commercialization at Woodside Energy

Mar 27, 2018

I think we'll get it to a 10, but I think at the moment it's got to be a good eight or nine out of 10 at least.

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Architect at Rakuten

Mar 27, 2018

Sometimes the service stops.

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Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 27, 2018

No, it's not yet stable.

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President at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Mar 27, 2018

Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves

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