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Ottawa technology firm Purple Forge has released a new application that can process voice requests made via mobile devices to access municipal services.

The service, which will be rolled out Wednesday on a trial basis in Surrey, B.C., is being added to the My Surrey app, which runs on cellphones, Apple Watch or other mobile devices and taps into the power of IBM’s supercomputer Watson to process requests.

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For example, a resident can ask, “How do I make a bylaw complaint?” and My Surrey will reply: “Make a bylaw or animal control complaint with our Surrey Request app, by email

at bylawcomplaint@surrey.ca or by phone at 604-591-4370”.

Watson, best known for winning a three-game challenge on Jeopardy in February, 2011, earning $1 million for charity in the process, is capable of ripping though the equivalent of 100 million books in a split-second.

Photo by Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen

The Jeopardy version consists of 90 servers using 2,880 processor cores and 15 terabytes of random access memory. The game show’s rules required that Watson be able to read the answers, interpret them correctly and deliver the correct questions, Jeopardy style. Watson’s human competitors, Jeopardy superstars Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, couldn’t come close to the machine’s ability.