





IBM today is revealing the new Watson Assistant, a product it has been working on for the past year with variety of enterprise clients. it’ll be marketed as a “smart enterprise assistant that brings along AI (AI), cloud and internet of Things (IoT)” that is customizable and secure. Kareem Yusef, head of Watson internet of things for IBM, commented in a web blog post this morning:

Over the previous couple of years, digital assistants have cemented their place in our homes, serving to execute routine every day tasks, from turning on our televisions to telling us about ‘this day in history.’ however these devices have additionally accomplished something else, they have set the groundwork for what’s next: really intelligent AI assistants that get to understand you.

WATSON ASSISTANT AN ASSISTANT FOR ENTERPRISES TO INTERACT WITH CUSTOMERS

You might be confused by IBM’s positioning of Watson Assistant as an enterprise answer and so viewing all of the promoting materials that depict client use cases. Watson has long been embedded among enterprises for enterprise users in health care, hr and cybersecurity. Watson Assistant is completely different. it’s designed for enterprises to use with their customer-facing applications. The video below shows variety of those use cases that build the Watson Assistant infused I-VIE from Chameleon Technology appear more like Alexa than Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S.

The idea is clearly that enterprises don’t need to turn over their client relationships to Amazon and Google. they will use Watson Assistant to make direct connections with customers and develop custom experiences. HARMAN International will demonstrate a Watson Assistant-enabled automobile infotainment system these days at IBM’s think conference. IBM says that Airwire, Munich airport, kaon Media and Royal Bank of Scotland also have Watson Assistant projects underway.

THE RISE OF THE INDEPENDENTS

This isn’t Watson’s first foray into consumer-like use cases. though it absolutely was clearly targeted at office users, Staples’ integration of Watson with its renowned simple Button in October 2016 showed that the voice assistant might tackle less complicated processes than reading medical pictures. it absolutely was known as the Staples’ easy System. the use cases profiled by Chameleon Technologies and HARMAN take this to a brand new level. it’s not clear once, or if, any of those capabilities are going to be offered to consumers. However, it will show a path to voice assistants that don’t rely on solutions from Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft.

This is the market that SoundHound is targeting with its Hound voice assistant. At CES, the Hound Assistant was on display in Hyundai cars. A key stress of Hound’s market positioning is that it’s independent of the large technology platforms and enables enterprises to customise client experiences and own their client information. Hound isn’t alone with this positioning. The open source Mycroft makes the same pitch and goes a step further to modify all data processing locally on the device to maximise security.

However, the large independent platform for a customizable voice assistant is nuance. nuance in some ways created the market for enterprise voice assistants and has thousands of implementations globally. The company’s Dragon Drive solution previewed at CES 2018 is the variety of in-car feature set you may expect HARMAN to try to duplicate with Watson Assistant.

What every of those examples reinforce is that while Alexa and Google Assistant have momentum with client use cases, enterprises have strong interest in having more control over the client experience and data. For this market, IBM is de facto seizing nuance more than Amazon or Google, at least for now. Amazon did introduce Alexa for Business in Dec 2017 and has its sights beyond kitchens and bedrooms to include cubicles and boardrooms. The battle for enterprise assistant market share is shaping up to be equally as competitive as the current war for consumer voice assistant users.





