Tag: Watson

IBM’s Watson supercomputer has added yet another skill to its resume: It can now make movie trailers. 20th Century Fox had Watson programmed to make the first AI-made trailer for its upcoming thriller film Morgan. It’s a fitting movie for Watson, since Morgan is a sci-fi flick about a group of scientists who created a humanoid machine that rapidly goes out of control.

Hilton Worldwide and IBM have teamed up to put a robot concierge into the Hilton McLean hotel in Virginia. The little ‘bot is called Connie and is the first Watson-enabled robot concierge in the world. Connie gets its knowledge from IBM’s powerful Watson computer and WayBlazer to help tourists and guests.

A couple of years ago, I talked about Supertoy, which claimed to be an interactive talking kid’s toy. Sadly, it seems that the development of the toy has stalled, leaving many of its backers frustrated. This week a similar product called CogniToys popped up on Kickstarter, boasting the technology of no less than IBM’s Watson supercomputer.

We haven’t heard much out of IBM and its impressive Watson supercomputer in a while. Watson is the supercomputer that IBM fielded as a contestant on Jeopardy back in 2011. Despite the fact that Watson was able to perform impressively well on the game show, it’s still been unable to pass the Turing test designed to determine if a computer can think for itself.

[Update: Scott Brooks, IBM Research VP of Marketing and Communications has written to us to say that this is absolutely not the case, and that there are no plans to use Watson for telemarketing. See Scott’s comment below.]

Watson, the IBM gaming computer, has finished its stint on Jeopardy, and trounced the human contestants on the game show. The human players were the famed human champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Apparently, the PBS show Nova did a piece on Watson and one of the producers of that story Michael Bicks noted on a chat about the program that Watson crashed during taping.

Remember Deep Blue? It was the supercomputer that tried to take on Garry Kasparov in a chess championship and managed to win back in 1997. Now IBM is back with its Watson computer, who’s now ready to take on some real Jeopardy champs.