It’s been more than two years since IBM’s Watson kicked some human butt on Jeopardy, and now the artificial intelligence system is on the verge of making it onto smartphones. IBM today announced “Watson Engagement Advisor,” software that lets businesses replace their current automated customer service systems with one that is based on Watson and is thus presumably much smarter.
Given the sorry state of automated customer service, it would be hard for Watson to make matters worse, and perhaps Watson will take away some of the pain of trying to talk to robots posing as customer service agents.
In the time since Watson wowed Alex Trebek, IBM’s “research and development staff has made Watson 75 percent smaller, 25 percent faster, and have been working hard to improve Watson’s ability to answer consumer-oriented questions,” IBM’s GM of Watson Solutions Manoj Saxena wrote in a blog post today.
Consumers interacting with Watson would be able to either type inquiries or speak them, with voice-recognition technology provided by third-party vendors such as Nuance, a New York Times story said. ANZ Bank in Australia and New Zealand told the Times that it’s testing Watson Engagement Advisor and is confident that it will work well in real life.
