IBM's Watson is lending its smarts to Slack and its chat bot
More sassy quips, more useful.
Slack is going to tap into IBM pet Watson and its cognitive computing skills, covering both bots and other conversation inferences. Slack's own Slackbot will be the first to get the intelligence makeover, with IBM and Slack looking to share what they learn from the experience with other developers. The companies believe integrating Watson will improve accuracy and efficiency of troubleshooting with the bot. IBM is also working on a Watson-powered Slack chatbot specifically for IT and network issues.
IBM's Watson is really sharing its wisdom around: it's just joined the Weather Channel's bot on Facebook Messenger, where it will learn your preferences and offer up personalized forecasts and even news for to US-based bot chatters. These bots will tap into IBM's Watson Virtual Agent. It specializes in cognitive conversational technology — put plainly, you can message it like you would a normal human and it should pick up what you're trying to say / looking for. And if it doesn't, it's getting continuously smarter from each interaction, so one day it will.
IBM says Watson's mad customer service skills can be deployed across bots, social media, SMS, mobile apps and even robotics. And that's not to mention all the music production. Watson, busy.
