Reply #53: Understanding speech is trivial compared to parsing the language

[pokerfan]

which is what the IBM cluster is doing. Heck, I had a phone ten years ago that had basic speech recognition. No, the challenge here is making sense of the grammar and syntax of the language especially given the wordplay and puns that are typical of a Jeopardy question.

Besides, the meatbag contestants aren't forced to rely solely on Trebek's spoken words as they can read the question directly. I suppose Watson could have been fitted with a camera and OCR system but, like the speech recognition, it would lie outside the scope of the IBM project.

ETA: One area where I think Watson might have an unfair advantage could be in hitting the buzzer. A contestant is not allowed to ring in until Trebek is finished reading the question. I'm not sure how this is communicated to Watson but if there isn't at least a 150 msec delay or thereabouts (for human reaction time) then Watson would be able to ring in before the meatbags even have a chance.