IBM is firing on all gears in its quest to drive machine learning into the mainstream. The company announced a string of collaborations on Tuesday, all powered by Watson, its technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to derive insights from huge volumes of unstructured data.
Propelled by its stated goal of integrating Watson into mainstream computing, IBM announced seven Watson-related projects, ranging from a bot for Facebook Messenger powered by Watson, to cognitive learning experience for college students – in collaboration with Pearson, and cognitive solutions intended for professionals in marketing, commerce, supply chain and human resources.
One of the platforms, IBM Watson Data Platform, helps companies gain more valuable insights from data. The platform delivers the “world’s fastest data ingestion engine and cognitive-powered decision-making to data professionals, allowing them to collaborate in the IBM Cloud, with the services they prefer,” according to IBM.
IBM is also making IBM Watson Machine Learning Service available, to “make machine learning simple with an intuitive, self-service interface.”
“Watson Data Platform applies cognitive assistance for creating machine learning models, making it far faster to get from data to insight. It also, provides one place to access machine learning services and languages, so that anyone, from an app developer to the Chief Data Officer, can collaborate seamlessly to make sense of data, ask better questions, and more effectively operationalize insight,” said Bob Picciano, Senior Vice President, IBM Analytics.
IBM also announced Watson Virtual Agent, a cognitive conversational technology that allows businesses to simply build and deploy conversational agents.
Watson Virtual Agent allows users – from startups and small businesses to enterprise – to easily and quickly build and train engagement bots from the cloud, harnessing the power of cognitive technologies, the company said.
Both Watson Virtual Agent and Watson Conversation are offered as cloud-based services, which allows for ongoing enhancements to content and capabilities.