It was also unclear to me when they did the contest as to whether Watson only had access to the analog audio and/or image of the questions asked. So did they have to parse the question the same as Ken.
Also, it was clearly optimized for a specific use case. If the questions were reworded with more clues that were puns or needed inference, I think Ken would have done about the same but Watson would have faired much more poorly.
They had the text of the question (the sentence), and they had to parse that and then the resulting question was then sent through a text to speech engine obviously, but there was no speech to text.
Also, it was clearly optimized for a specific use case. If the questions were reworded with more clues that were puns or needed inference, I think Ken would have done about the same but Watson would have faired much more poorly.