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IBM Watson Discovery Reviews

Vendor: IBM
3.9 out of 5
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What is IBM Watson Discovery?

Watson Discovery is an award-winning enterprise search and AI search technology that breaks open data silos and retrieves specific answers to your questions while analyzing trends and relationships buried in enterprise data. Watson Discovery applies the latest breakthroughs in machine learning, including natural language processing capabilities, and is easily trained on the language of your domain. Unlike competitors, Watson Discovery can be deployed on any cloud or on-premises environment.

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IBM Watson Discovery is the #4 ranked solution in top Indexing and Search solutions. PeerSpot users give IBM Watson Discovery an average rating of 7.8 out of 10. IBM Watson Discovery is most commonly compared to Elastic Search: IBM Watson Discovery vs Elastic Search. IBM Watson Discovery is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 74% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a computer software company, accounting for 34% of all views.
Buyer's Guide
Indexing and Search
March 2025
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IBM Watson Discovery mindshare

As of April 2025, the mindshare of IBM Watson Discovery in the Indexing and Search category stands at 4.5%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Indexing and Search
 
 
Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

  • "The most valuable feature of IBM Watson Discovery is testing, mainly because the product applies conversational AI, which means I can ask questions to get the information I want from a specific test area."
  • "The most valuable features of IBM Watson Discovery are the integration with the rest of the Watson Suite and the Watson Assistant capability. If you use Watson Assistant, the ability for it to be able to determine the accuracy of your voice models and your voice response systems is a benefit."
  • "Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable. The capability to crawl external sites and internal documents, and then draw internal information with external contents is also valuable."

Room for Improvement

  • "The pricing is an area for improvement in IBM Watson Discovery because the customer initially used the free version. Still, when he needed more questions and documents, he had to move to a different version, which was paid and cost $500 per month. That change in pricing made my company lose many customers."
  • "The support from IBM Watson Discovery is good but could improve to make it great."
  • "It needs a lot of memory. Our index is very big. It is around 100 gigabytes. So, we need more than 100 gigabytes of memory to use Watson."

Pricing

  • "IBM Watson Discovery is an expensive product."
  • "Cost-wise, it is very reasonable because it is cloud-based."
These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.
Download our Indexing and Search Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Top industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
34%
Government
17%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Energy/Utilities Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Pharma/Biotech Company
3%
Logistics Company
2%
Construction Company
2%
Non Profit
2%
Outsourcing Company
2%
Engineering Company
2%
Real Estate/Law Firm
2%
Retailer
2%
Hospitality Company
2%
Educational Organization
2%

Compare IBM Watson Discovery with alternative products

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IBM Watson Discovery customers

Prudential, Bradesco, Woodside

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Popular Comparisons

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IBM Watson Discovery reviews

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PeerSpot user
Research at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Verified user of IBM Watson Discovery
Nov 17, 2020
Great language support, solid stability, and reasonable cost

Pros

"Language support and the ability to build a natural language of speech recognition are the most valuable features."

Cons

"There are probably other chatbots out there that were built for specific use cases and are easier to deploy than this. Having said that, Watson is way more flexible. While it may require a greater amount of effort, it is not substantially more than some of the other ones that are kind of prebuilt for a specific use case. It would be good to have more prebuilt and specific use cases and specific business models. It can have better phone integration, even though I think that it is actually becoming less of an issue. Most people are online nowadays."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use it for the help desk.

How has it helped my organization?

It has allowed us to provide longer service availability for support to users. Currently, so many people are working remotely or from home. Because of this solution, we didn't have to surge staffing to be able to meet the needs of so many users, especially when people are working longer hours and require more support, and are transitioning to a completely remote role.

*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Read full review (663 words)
Geraldo Lima - PeerSpot user
Sales Director at Kukac
Verified user of IBM Watson Discovery
Jan 17, 2023
Stable, scalable, and has testing and conversational AI features

Pros

"The most valuable feature of IBM Watson Discovery is testing, mainly because the product applies conversational AI, which means I can ask questions to get the information I want from a specific test area."

Cons

"The pricing is an area for improvement in IBM Watson Discovery because the customer initially used the free version. Still, when he needed more questions and documents, he had to move to a different version, which was paid and cost $500 per month. That change in pricing made my company lose many customers."

What is our primary use case?

We use IBM Watson Discovery on some projects for our customers. We've used the product with IBM Watson Assistant to create solutions and answers about customer products.

Our primary use case for IBM Watson Discovery is understanding products by getting product information from some folders and documents. We have the IBM Watson Assistant in front, which gets answers or specific information from our records, and then it takes care of the conversation with customers, making it more human-like.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature of IBM Watson Discovery is testing, mainly because the product applies conversational AI, which means I can ask questions to get the information I want from a specific test area. Then, I'll receive a conversational answer from IBM Watson Discovery, even if I ask the question in a non-conversational format.

For general use cases, the product is okay, but for more technical requirements, that's still to be determined.

*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Read full review (784 words)
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PeerSpot user
Research at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Verified user of IBM Watson Discovery
Aug 3, 2022
Beneficial accuracy reports, highly scalable, and simple initial setup

Pros

"The most valuable features of IBM Watson Discovery are the integration with the rest of the Watson Suite and the Watson Assistant capability. If you use Watson Assistant, the ability for it to be able to determine the accuracy of your voice models and your voice response systems is a benefit."

Cons

"The support from IBM Watson Discovery is good but could improve to make it great."

What is our primary use case?

We used IBM Watson Discovery to look at the different models that we have built and their performance accuracy.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable features of IBM Watson Discovery are the integration with the rest of the Watson Suite and the Watson Assistant capability. If you use Watson Assistant, the ability for it to be able to determine the accuracy of your voice models and your voice response systems is a benefit.

*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Read full review (298 words)
Roger Itai - PeerSpot user
Founding partner at Proxima TI
Verified user of IBM Watson Discovery
May 8, 2022
Allows us to use rules to extract information and crawl external sites, but it needs a lot of memory

Pros

"Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable. The capability to crawl external sites and internal documents, and then draw internal information with external contents is also valuable."

Cons

"It needs a lot of memory. Our index is very big. It is around 100 gigabytes. So, we need more than 100 gigabytes of memory to use Watson."

What is most valuable?

Being able to have some rules to extract the entities is valuable. The capability to crawl external sites and internal documents, and then draw internal information with external contents is also valuable.

What needs improvement?

It needs a lot of memory. Our index is very big. It is around 100 gigabytes. So, we need more than 100 gigabytes of memory to use Watson.

*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Read full review (239 words)