How IBM Watson Is Changing the Tech Game
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been advancing at a steady rate with both consumer and enterprise products making headways over the past decade. However, the consumer field has really brought AI onto the public limelight with technologies such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana.
Machine learning has always been a pipe dream and a sci-fi construct until these products started appearing on our mobile devices and helping us with navigation, search and more. However, the enterprise field has also made leaps and strides in this field with products such as IBM’s Watson, the system whose forerunner, Deep Blue, was made famous for besting a chess champion Vlaeimir Kramnik in 2006.
Since the days of Deep Blue, Watson has continued to be developed and integrated into various enterprise technologies. Startups are even utilizing it for their own products. It is really these startups that are offering ever more interesting and cheaper innovations worth exploring. Oftentimes, they are acquired by the larger players and the full circle is made with end users benefitting from constant AI innovation.
We can look at what sorts of directions these start-up companies are going — thus predict trends — as well as see their influence on bigger firms, both through ideas and acquisitions, by looking at the mobile app space. Apps for tablets and smartphones are really where many start-up technologies make their presence felt before really focusing on enterprise markets.
An example of a technology that aides in networking remotely is Tone Analyzer from IBM Watson. This technology, using IBM Watson at its core, is providing employees communicating across virtual space the means to gauge behavioral cues. Employers and co-workers are able to gauge communications to prevent the other recipients from feeling annoyed or offended and change their dialogue or tone on the spot.
Tone Analyzer includes linguistic analysis to be used to interpret emotions and social tendencies in tweets, online reviews, e-mail messages, and other form of text. IBM also has a Speech to Text app available with Watson’s AI algorithm in play.
Such technologies are also opening up the door for chatbots to be more intelligent and effective in communicating with end users; thus helping companies communicate with their customers remotely.
AI will continue to advance and learn from our behaviours as it infiltrates more products with newer systems in place. Chatbots, Autonomous Vehicles, smart refrigerators and the like will continue to utilize such systems but the enterprise markets will also benefit from these advancements as companies can process big data more efficiently for instance.
Please note, I am working on using IBM Watson to create a chatbot and my story may pop up soon on Pluralsight. So keep an eye out. I also recently added a chatbot under a different moniker to my website artisticcounterculture.com.
