Azure AI Search vs. IBM Watson Discovery

Incredibly robust software for an enterprise organization to plug into their application. If you have a full development resource team at your disposal, this is great software and I highly recommend it. Largely, however, you won't be able to use this prior to the enterprise level. It's just too complicated and cumbersome of a product.

Incentivized

Overall, IBM Watson Discovery is an amazing technology that we use with our clients to address various business problems, but the biggest challenge has always been about ingesting, analyzing, enriching, and searching huge collections of documents and allowing our end users and SMEs to be able to search for what they need to reduce the time and efforts spent daily on a manual search through various collections of documents. We have successfully managed to reduce manual work by over 80%, and now our SMEs are being used for the skills they have to gather insights rather than do manual work.

Incentivized

• Azure Search provides a fully-managed service for loading, indexing, and querying content.
• Azure Search has an easy C# SDK that allows you to implement loading and retrieving data from the service very easy. Any developer with some Microsoft experience should feel immediate familiarity.
• Azure Search has a robust set of abilities around slicing and presenting the data during a search, such as narrowing by geospatial data and providing an auto-complete capabilities via "Suggesters".
• Azure Search has one-of-a-kind "Cognitive Search" capabilities that enable running AI algorithms over data to enrich it before it is stored into the service. For example, one could automatically do a sentiment analysis when ingesting the data and store that as one of the searchable fields on the content.

Incentivized

• It is an excellently fast platform with documents and the answers to queries.
• With automation learning beneficial as it saves time.
• When searching for a document, everything stays located and easy to find.
• Acceptance of various documents.
• It has a quite comfortable Technical support, always available when required.

Incentivized

• Cross platform compatibility to integrate with various OS
• Optimizing latency.
• Nothing better than work on price, create more flexible options.

Incentivized

• I believe AI should be more flexible about providing data. However, it's understandable that you need to provide the details you need in a more specific and detailed way.
• The interface could use more tweaking. Being new to the program, it was kind of hard to navigate.
• Luckily, there was a customized feature of the dashboard that I could set up, and having something that you know where you are placed always feels familiar and comfortable.

Incentivized

IBM Watson Discovery has the best user capabilities and easily transform business decision-making portfolio. The automation system saves time used in data analysis as opposed to manual research that consumes a lot of time. The visualization across the dashboard enables my team to interpret complex data and use it to make reliable marketing decisions.

Incentivized

Similar to all IBM Watson and Salesforce product solutions, the overall support would be a 10/10. Their provided FAQ's help with frequently experienced issues and if still unable to figure something out, their customer service representatives are always super responsive. With instant chat functions available, it is easy to ask a quick question rather than sitting on hold.

Incentivized

Azure Search is a competitor against Google's own AI autosuggest a feature. We went with Azure because our network security folks found it to be more robust from a security standpoint, which is incredibly important when you have proprietary manufacturing information. Additionally, we're a Microsoft shop so it plugged into our cloud hosting package and client facing OS.

Incentivized

Discovery differs from its competitors due to the better ease of implementation and the high level of natural language recognition, it is equal in integration resources such as API and workflow or process pipeline, but it loses in the price for a high volume of documents and/or research. If you own or plan to use other services from the IBM Watson family, there is no doubt that Watson discovery is your best option. Another important point is if you plan to use a cloud or on-premise service (local server or private cloud).

Incentivized

• Azure Search enabled us to stand up a robust search capability with very few developer hours.
• The fully-managed service of Azure Search means we get low cost of management (EG, DevOps) going into the future, even though the cost of the service itself definitely reflects the time saved.
• Azure Search counts as a "Cognitive Service" for Microsoft Azure consumption and aligns our products with Microsoft's interests of driving an AI-first approach in the enterprise. Microsoft Partners, service and product companies alike, should be looking to align with this AI vision as it means favorable treatment from the Microsoft sales teams.

Incentivized

• We find its Enterprise plan expensive for a country of LATAM. For US or Europe based businesses, looks great.
• A Big Data and massive queries based company would find the service expensive. Maybe a flat price plan would be helpful.
• Have you thought in making a cheaper plan where you take the learning from your customer's data to enrich your AI tool?

Incentivized