IBM Watson Trend App forecasts trend products for holidays

IBM has launched the IBM Watson Trend App, a new way for shoppers to understand the top trends of the holiday season. The app shows gifts and toys that will be the most popular for the holiday. It helps consumers predict the hottest products that are likely to sell out at Christmas.

According to Venture Beat, Watson Trend App uses application program interfaces (API) from IBM's open Watson developer platform. IBM Watson mines unstructured data, including social media sites, blogs, forums, ratings, reviews, etc., and uses machine learning and natural language processing to reveal key insights.

The app filters the sentiment of millions of online conversations across the internet. It uses keyword and sentiment analysis, concept tagging, and taxonomy classification to collect data. The collected data gives insight on consumer sentiment and shopping patterns.

The app is available to download at the Apple App Store for free. It  will also add geographic and language data in the future.

According to Mashable, IBM's Watson Trend App provides suggestions of trending products in a number of categories include consumer electronics, toys, and health. Each group is given a relative daily Trend Score, ranging from 0 to 100 based on the size of conversation and the rate of growth of the conversation data about the specific items. Users can view the top 100 trending products in each of the categories.

Some suggestions are very specific, for example, PlayStation 4, but others are not specific such as Dell desktop computers, so the users might need an extra effort to find the exact product.

The app also offers a brief summary of what people are saying about the item that explains why it thinks the item will be popular. It also predicts whether an item may be popular among specific consumer groups or area that informs the user about who may be most likely to want it.

As mentioned in a report by Forbes, IBM Watson Trend's early sight top trends  include Lego sets: Star Wars, Lego City, and Friends. The app suggests purchase of these items sooner rather later. Other top trending toys include Hello Barbie and PAW Patrol Imagicard learning game

Other trending items based on Watson app suggestions including standalone camera Nikon D-SLR as the number one choice for photography amateurs, Oculus Rift for movie lovers, and wearable tech Gameband.

IBM Watson Trend also predicts on how consumers will shop for these gifts. The app says that the mobile traffic will exceed desktop traffic over the holiday period. The mobile traffic is expected to increase by nearly 57%, up 17% from last year. Mobile sales are predicted to increase by more than 36%, up 34% over 2014.