7IBM: Cognitive Computing Helps Machines Debate With Humans
IBM is the granddaddy of the computer industry, having been in existence for over 100 years. Constantly innovating, it dominated the mainframe industry in the 1960s and 1970s before pioneering the personal computer concept in the 1980s.
Like other US tech giants, it was not slow to understand the importance of machine learning. Its best known artificial intelligence (AI) endeavor is IBM Watson, a “cognitive computing” platform that became famous when it defeated two long-standing human champions at the gameshow Jeopardy!1
Since then Watson has been deployed across thousands of business use cases, and continues to be used by IBM to demonstrate the power and flexibility of its machine learning technology.
How Does IBM Use Artificial Intelligence?
As well as winning television gameshows, Watson has been deployed in many industries where its natural language processing capabilities are driving efficiency and creating new opportunities.
It was originally envisaged as a question-and-answer engine, but over the years its applications have diversified as its skillset has grown.
Royal Bank of Scotland uses Watson to power its customer service chatbot, Cora. Cora was trained on over 1,000 responses to 200 customer service queries. It then continues to learn after it is deployed, building links between natural language questions posed by human customers and the responses it has stored in its database.2 If a conversation becomes ...
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