Slack and IBM team up for Watson integration in chat app

The chat app Slack has announced that it is partnering with IBM to integrate the Watson machine learning computer system into Slackbot. This is a virtual assistant within the Slack application. In addition, developers get access to the ‘Conversation’ API.

Conversation is a system that allows interaction based on natural language. Therefore, according to IBM, it is mainly suitable for use in chatbots and other virtual interlocutors. Venture Beat writes that IBM is making a plug-in that allows developers to access the api. This should make it easier to develop bots yourself. The code for the plugin is planned to be made available via GitHub eventually, but IBM declined to release details about the schedule, the site said.

“Right now, Slackbot takes a user’s input and does a search on it, but there’s no artificial intelligence behind it to help understand the query,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Bloomberg. That should change with integration with Watson, which features techniques such as sentiment analysis and text-to-speech, which allow the system to identify emotion and convert text into spoken language. In addition to the changes to Slackbot, IBM and Slack are working on another assistant, who should be able to answer ICT-related questions within the chat app.

IBM also uses Watson for other purposes, such as ordering from major online chains and customer support. The company offers these activities under the new ‘Virtual Agent’ service. Recently, the self-learning Watson system also came into use in music, Forbes wrote. The artist Alex Da Kid used the system to compose a new song. By analyzing existing music, Watson is able to create new pieces of music based on a certain emotion. In addition to music, the system has applications in food, fashion and movies, the site said.