(Image source: Hemispheres Magazine)
BY: MEGAN FAROKHMANESH
ANCHOR: JIM FLINK
Remember Watson, IBM’s artificial intelligence system?
“Boise-eyed skull. Watson?”
“Who is Mary Leeky?”
“You’re right.”
“800, same category.”
After cleaning out its human competition in Jeopardy, speculation rose on where Watson would head next.
Watson has already taken a job in health care, acting as a diagnostic tool for physicians.
Both the University of Maryland and Columbia University opened their doors to the supercomputer.
But IBM turned the focus to customer service with this video:
“The first level of application of Watson in the marketplace will be around call centers.”
“It would actually change the business models of how call centers are set up.”
“Call centers are very large cores for industries, where they get literally millions and millions of phonecalls. Sometimes people get very frustrated because they have to wait minutes and sometimes hours to get an answer.”
“The goal would be to increase service quality and to be able to provide answers quickly.”
That’s right - supercomputer Watson may soon be answering your calls for tech support.
So how would it work? Extreme Tech explains how Watson -- could be filling sales roles in the near future.
“Watson … is powered by Big Blue’s DeepQA software … fundamentally a huge search engine that can be used to answer questions. You fill it with gigabytes or terabytes of raw data — such as general knowledge for Jeopardy, symptoms for medical diagnosis, or product specifications for sales and support — and DeepQA turns it into useful, actionable facts...”
In an extensive piece in Hemispheres Magazine, one writer explains -- Watson will be able to provide retailers -- and marketers -- highly specific, usable information.
“Between web analytics, behavioral tracking and location-aware mobile apps, companies are inundated. ...Ask Watson, ‘How do I send that customer a coupon she’ll actually use?’ and Watson might tell you she just bought dog food for the first time and suggest you send a deal on a dog bed to her iPad at 8 p.m.”
IBM’s Interactive Web Strategy team also believes that when the technology is perfected quote- “there will be no turning back.”
Transcript by Newsy.
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