Watson to Learn Japanese

 Artificial Intelligence  

IBM Watson is going to Japan via IBM's new alliance with Japanese telecommunication giant SoftBank. IBM and SoftBank will explore new ways to deliver Watson's cognitive and natural language capabilities, including through mobile, tablet, and robots.

S oftbank and IBM have announced a landmark global alliance to bring Watson to Japan. The alliance, which involves training Watson to understand Japanese, represents a major milestone in IBM's efforts to accelerate the adoption of cognitive computing and a powerful example of how SoftBank, makers of the robot Pepper, is transforming Japanese businesses and society.

The goal of the collaboration is for SoftBank and IBM to bring new apps and services powered by Watson to market in the region, by establishing a broad local ecosystem of partners, entrepreneurs, and app developers who will apply Watson in new and innovative ways.

The alliance will combine SoftBank's leadership in the Japanese business and technology markets with IBM's Watson cognitive computing technologies, research capabilities and services to help transform entire industries and professions.

"The alliance with SoftBank, an industry pioneer, will bring new Watson capabilities to organizations in one of the most innovative parts of the world," said Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson Group. "Together, we will be able to more quickly deploy Watson to enterprises throughout Japan, while building a rich ecosystem of partners, entrepreneurs, developers and other third-parties to design and deliver an entirely new class of cognitive computing apps."

"Through this strategic alliance, we are excited that SoftBank and IBM will further develop IBM Watson with Japanese language capability and drive its adoption in the Japanese market," said Ken Miyauchi, Representative Director and Chief Operating Officer, SoftBank. "Watson's technology, which analyzes large volumes of data, and can understand and answer complex questions posed in natural, is in harmony with SoftBank Group's corporate mission of 'Information Revolution - Happiness for Everyone.' We believe the technology will be applied to a broad range of areas, from enterprise to consumer sectors, and create new value for people."

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IBM is teaching Watson to speak, and think, in Japanese, one of most difficult languages for a computer to navigate because of its reliance on the complex diagrammatical alphabet known as kanji.

Watson will be hosted by SoftBank's data centers across the country.

"The Japanese language presented IBM researchers with a number of unique challenges to overcome, most notably the first time the Watson system has learned a language that relies on characters not shared by the Western alphabet," said Paul Yonamine, General Manager, IBM Japan. "We expect Watson will deliver innovation to the academic, government services, and various industries, while improving overall agility and decision making for our clients.. SoftBank and IBM will apply the technology in multiple industries and business domains to usher in a new era of computing in Japan."

"The Japanese language presented IBM researchers with a number of unique challenges to overcome, most notably the first time the Watson system has learned a language that relies on characters not shared by the Western alphabet."

Watson is the first commercially available cognitive computing capability.  The system, delivered through the cloud, analyzes volumes of data, understands complex questions posed in natural language, and proposes evidenced-based answers.  Watson represents a new era in computing where systems will understand the world in the way that humans do: through senses, learning, and experience.

As part of the collaboration, IBM and SoftBank intend to deliver new powered by Watson cloud-based services.  The two organizations will initially target Japan's education, banking, healthcare, insurance and retail industries, where companies are striving to give customers more relevant information about products and services, and improve overall decision making by analyzing diverse, high volume data streams.

The alliance builds upon an ongoing, joint technical collaboration around cognitive computing technology between SoftBank and IBM Research – Tokyo. Watson's ability to understand Japanese is the result of more than two decades of research and development undertaken by IBM Research in the areas of natural language processing, both in Japanese and other non-European languages. The Japanese language uses thousands of characters, many of which can carry different meanings and pronunciations depending on the context of conversation, the relationships between participants, their age and gender. Like any major language, there are many unique idioms that must be fully understood for natural human interaction.

To capture new and emerging opportunities, IBM and SoftBank will focus on the following strategic areas to deliver Watson solutions in Japan:

• Expand Watson's Knowledge: IBM and SoftBank will work together to further teach and train Watson in the Japanese language as well as various industry domains.
• Develop Localized APIs and Development Environments: The two companies will provide localized APIs and development environments that can be used to create new powered by Watson apps. This will include new resources and services delivered through the IBM Watson Developer Cloud.
• Build and Expand the Watson Ecosystem: The two companies will work together to establish a robust local ecosystem of partners, developers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and academics who will advance the adoption of cognitive computing throughout Japan. 

As global demand for cognitive computing increases, the IBM and SoftBank alliance will accelerate IBM's strategy to deliver the transformative capabilities of Watson to clients around the world, as well as the objectives of SoftBank to advance the information and technology industries through superior business models.

SoftBank will be IBM's preferred technology delivery partner for Watson solutions in Japan, where the technology could be embedded into various form factors such as desktop, tablets and mobile devices, as well as robots, offering both organizations an opportunity to reach a far broader audience of users.    

SOURCE  PR Newswire

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