IBM Watson Trend iOS app promises Black Friday insights, but mostly fails

Currently, the application, available on the website and also on iOS devices, supports the top 100 products across three categories: technology and consumer electronics, toys, and health and fitness. Using IBM Watson, the artificial intelligence bot best known for besting our own Ken Jennings, Jeopardy! champ and geography master, IBM will predict which gifts are trending before stores start running out.

The app, IBM Watson Trend, aims to "help shoppers understand what is trending and why", by putting supercomputer Watson's sophisticated combination of natural language and machine learning to work, to help you shop smart.

The tech giant recently launched the IBM Watson Trend app. IBM predicts that for the first time this year mobile will overtake desktop for people seeking a bargain, with mobile sales set to increase by more than 36 percent in 2015. Watson groups conversations into trends and topics, and each trend receives a score between 0 and 100.

Each product comes with these direct comments from buyers and users, along with charts visualizing the product's ranking on the site over the past several months and a billboard "Story Behind the Trend" summary at the top of the page.

About the advantage of using the new Watson Trend app, IBM said that the app has the capability to determine the shoppers' general reaction to any particular product, as well as ascertain whether that reaction is trending upward or downward.

A few of the most talked about products as it stands: the Apple Watch, Samsung televisions, and Star Wars Legos. The company past year invested $1 billion "to accelerate the commercialization of IBM Watson, bringing cognitive computing to more clients and partners in more industries".