IBM has struck a deal SoftBank Telecom Corporation to bring the IBM Watson artificial intelligence (or, as IBM calls it, cognitive computing) system to Japan. The was announced on Tuesday.
Watson has already been trained in Japanese, so now it’s matter of getting its capabilities into production via specialized systems, apps or even robots running Watson APIs. As in the United States, early focus areas include education, banking, health care, insurance and retail.
[company]IBM[/company] has had a somewhat difficult time selling Watson, so maybe the Japanese market will help the company figure out why. It could be that the technology doesn’t work as well or as easily as advertised, or it could just be that American companies, developers and consumers aren’t ready to embrace so many natural-language-powered applications.
The deal with SoftBank isn’t the first time IBM has worked to teach a computer Japanese. The company is also part of a project with several Japanese companies and agencies, called the Todai Robot, to build a system that runs on a laptop and can pass the University of Tokyo entrance exam.
We’ll be talking a lot about artificial intelligence and machine that can learn at our Structure Data conference in March, with speakers from Facebook, Spotify, Yahoo and other companies. In September, we’re hosting Gigaom’s inaugural Structure Intelligence conference, which will be all about AI.
