Ever wonder how Watson beat all comers in Jeopardy or how Siri or Google Now work?  Thinking about deploying Question Answering (QA) technology in your application?  QA and NLP technology have finally hit the mainstream and are making information access easier and more personalized every day.  The best part?  Open source technologies make it easier than ever to build and deploy question answering technology.  In this talk, we'll lay the foundation of building a next generation QA system using open source like Apache Solr and various open source NLP libraries as well as demonstrate a working system able to answer real natural language questions.