Emily McManus, editor of TED.com, can’t tell you the answer to this age-old question. But for a long time, based on the hundreds of TED talks she’s watched since 2007, she could point you to relevant takes from some of the world’s top thinkers. However, with more than 2,000 talks posted to date, even she’s no longer seen every single one. “No one human has,” McManus says.

Now she has the help of IBM’s Watson, the conversationally-conversant AI computer system that famously won Jeopardy! in 2011.

Over eight weeks, an IBM team created a unique tool for exploring TED’s body of work that it will demonstrate at a Watson developers conference it’s holding in New York City on May 5.

When asked a question, the program surfaces TED talks that touch on the relevant concepts and cuts helpfully to the exact section of the talk. The “search result,” with one cut played after another from different talks, is something like a super mashup of TED speakers taking on whatever deep questions of society and the universe strike your fancy. There’s also a timeline that shows concepts that come up during each talk and data visualization that maps the connectedness of all the talks.





“We can pick up ideas that emerge,” says Jeffrey Coveyduc, IBM’s director of advanced cognitive technology. “It’s like a rolling discovery tool, and it’s all concept-driven. There are topics that come up that are never explicitly mentioned,” he notes.

Another, perhaps even more interesting feature is that Watson is also doing a sentiment and psycholinguistic analysis on each speaker’s talk. A talk given by global health expert Hans Rosling on “How not to be ignorant about the world,” for example, summarizes his presence as “heartfelt and tranquil” (sounds about right for TED) and notes his presentation has a relative small emotional range and high degree of openness. Such a feature could eventually analyze speaker traits across the broad spectrum of presenters and surface other unexpected connections, the researchers say.