Does IBM Watson use machine learning? I was reading an article on Medium and wanted to make it clear whether a bot created on IBM Watson is an intelligent one or unintelligent.


  Simply put, there are 2 types of chatbots — unintelligent ones that act using predefined conversation flows (algorithms) written by developers building them and intelligent ones that use machine learning to interact with users.
Yes, it does and at many parts of the solution. For one of the core components - intent detection - Intento did a benchmark comparing IBM Watson and other similar products: https://www.slideshare.net/KonstantinSavenkov/nlu-intent-detection-benchmark-by-intento-august-2017

Outside of intent detection, there are other areas where AI techniques help - e.g. disambiguation, bootstrapping a bot from chat logs etc. Specifically for IBM Watson, you can learn more here: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-assistant/features/