IBM's supercomputer Watson is now your best shopping companion

It’s been more than two years since IBM’s Watson made its hit TV debut on Jeopardy! And now, Watson is the latest “cognitive, expert personal shopper” developed by an early stage partner in the IBM Watson Developers Cloud, digital shopping company Fluid.

Their Watson-powered app—the Fluid Expert Personal Shopper—marries Watson’s transformational cognitive computing that provides dialogue-driven assistance with product recommendations and content, letting consumers make queries using Watson’s natural language processing (NLP). 

But, “Watson’s natural language capabilities are not what make it special,” Brooke Aguilar, VP Global Business Development at Fluid told brandchannel. “The big differentiator is that Watson is a learning machine and one that quickly learns from and adapts with each interaction. In the context of digital shopping this presents a tremendous opportunity for Fluid to give consumers highly engaging and rich shopping experiences that are personalized and become more so with continued use.”

The app incorporates consumer information to become smarter with each interaction and operates as a knowledgeable sales associate in the palm of your hand, fueling a new era of cognitive apps. 

IBM is sharing its technology with the global entrepreneurial community to help build the next generation of apps. “The move aims to spur innovation and fuel a new ecosystem of entrepreneurial software application providers—ranging from start-ups and emerging, venture capital backed businesses to established players," according to a press release.

 

The North Face is the first brand to sign-on to the Fluid Expert Personal Shopper. “Say you’re on the TheNorthFace.com site. You’re planning a two-week camping trip to Wyoming’s Wind River mountain range in May. You could ask, “What gear and food will I need?” and learn what you’ll want to know so you can have a more safe and comfortable experience—such as the fact that it often snows in the Wind Rivers in springtime.”

Since that now infamous public debut in 2011, Watson has gained a 240 percent improvement in system performance and a 75 percent reduction in the physical requirements needed to run the system which can now operate from a single Power 750 server with Linux from a cloud computing environment. 

The biggest challenge to the Fluid team in building the app was adapting “the Watson system and team to accommodate an entirely new vertical market focus,” said Aguilar. “Previously, the majority of effort commercializing Watson technology has been in healthcare. Adapting Watson to direct consumer access in a retail context requires new thinking and creative approaches.”

The future of apps like Watson in retail, Aguilar added, is to “serve the rich, relevant content so consumers can make smart, satisfying purchases in a totally natural context that begins to break down the consumer/computer barrier. It puts the power in the hands of the consumer like never before, and it gets better every time.”

By: Sheila Shayon
Link: http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2013/11/28/IBM-Watson-Fluid-App-112813.aspx