Watson — the IBM supercomputer that became a Kardashian-size celebrity by taking down two “Jeopardy” champs last year — is finished with game shows.
Watson wants to do a hospital drama or maybe a cop show next.
“Something like ‘House’ or ‘Cold Case’ or ‘CSI’ — trying to dig into the details and read a bunch of stuff and relate it to the problem,” says Dr. David Ferrucci, the lead researcher who has been overseeing Watson’s development since 2006.
“The direction we are going with this technology would be to do something more investigative, where you are trying to understand an entire case,” he tells The Post.
“I don’t know that something like ‘Wheel of Fortune’ would be that much of a challenge,”
With the ability to communicate using natural language and sift through 200 million pages of data in seconds, Watson is not exactly waiting by the phone for Hollywood to call again.
A year after flattening the competition on “Jeopardy” and pulling the highest ratings in the show’s history, Watson is working in corporate America these days.
In September, heath care provider Wellpoint enlisted the first-of-its-kind computer technology to help crunch numbers and suggest diagnosis and treatment options for doctors in its network.
And last month, a Watson clone was hired by Citigroup to help analyze customer needs and improve its consumer banking experience.
“Every time we do an application, we will take the Watson framework and software and optimize it for that customer,” Ferrucci says.
Each client “gets their own physical computer — but it is not necessarily the same configuration as the one that played on ‘Jeopardy.’ ”
The original room-sized machine -— which communicates through text, not voice, like on TV — remains at IBM headquarters in Yorktown Heights where Ferrucci and his team of 35 continue to pump it full of new information every day.
Since whaling on quiz show champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Watson has been spoofed on “Conan” and “SNL” and matched wits with congressmen and Harvard scholars.
It’s also begun to develop an artificial personality based on the type data he’s received.
“Today I asked Watson ‘What is your favorite animal?’ And it came back with the dromedary, which is a type of camel,” Ferrucci says.
“His favorite movie is ‘Forrest Gump.’ Favorite color is purple. And his favorite actor is Jim Carrey — so he obviously has a sense of humor.”
(In fact, “Watson answers these questions in same way he would answer any question,” says Ferrucci. “He is looking at who is looking at who is talking about Jim Carrey and how favorite of an actor Jim Carrey is.”)
Though Watson is capable of analyzing thousands of news articles to determine his “likes,” the machine has no idea how famous it is.
“We probably have to update some stuff from the Web for him to understand that,” Ferrucci says.