Startup pitch: IBM's Watson powers new travel advice tool WayBlazer – Tnooz.

Its been a long time in incubation but IBM Watson is on the move and its heading for travel

Terry Jones, chairman of WayBlazer the first to use IBMs watson for a dedicate travel planning tool, first contacted with Manoj Saxena the GM of IBM Watson about 3 years ago and talked then about the an incredible business opportunity.

The idea was to bring Watson to travel and offer something new, as Jones says “Watson is very different from the kind of computers I ran at Sabre or previous startups. It’s a computer that speaks and understands natural language. It can make sense of unstructured data, like words on an internet website.”

Jones and Manjo believe that the the travel booking problem has been solved fairly well planning has not!.

“WayBlazer can change that, make planning a trip online as easy as having a conversation with a friend.We add Watson’s natural-language processing to a cognitive travel graph we license from another company in Austin, Cognitive Scale. That graph database allows us to relate concepts to each other — people, places, times, deals.”

It is also a highly visual solution along the lines of http://VisualBookingsTechnology.com. For this WayBalzer has sourced hundreds of thousands of open-source images on the web to supplement results with visuals, these include images of tours-and-activities.

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