IBM rolls out Watson platform to Silicon Valley
IBM has announced it is to open up its Watson platform to developers, entrepreneurs and businesses in Silicon Valley to dovetail with the launch of a new ‘Watson hub’ in San Francisco.
In the 20 months since Watson took the Jeopardy world by storm IBM has built a new suite of software tools designed to give the platform new capabilities in language, vision and speech, opening up a raft of potential new applications in a range of industries and professions.
Promising avenues of approach for the cloud-delivered cognitive computing technology are currently being investigated in the hope of powering the first commercialisation of ‘artificial intelligence’ across a variety of sectors including education, sports medicine, citizen services, health care, financial services and human resources.
Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson, commented: “Since introducing the Watson development platform, thousands of people have used these technologies in new and inventive ways, and many have done so without extensive experience as a coder or data scientist. We believe that by opening Watson to all, and continuously expanding what it can do, we are democratizing the power of data and with it innovation.”
Amongst those to benefit are three UK companies; 50wise, Volume and SocialBro with specialisms in financial services, sales training and online marketing respectively.