During the British summer, conversations about sport become almost ubiquitous. This year, however, one participant in those conversations was very different: IBM Watson, IBM’s cognitive intelligence.
The All England Lawn Tennis Club knew that 2016 would feature unusually fierce competition for attention, with the Tour de France and Euro 2016 taking place alongside Wimbledon. More than ever before, social media was going to be a vital tool in directing that conversation, and directing attention to SW19.
Wimbledon’s “Cognitive Command Centre” – powered by Watson’s intelligence running on a hybrid, IBM-managed cloud - scanned social media for emerging news and trends. With 19 courts, 3,500 journalists covering Wimbledon and only six seconds to capture a social media user’s attention, this would be a task far beyond even a massive team. Instead, human experts taught Watson how to understand social discussion across four key services – Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram. In total, 11 million pieces of content were analysed during Wimbledon.
“Watson’s understanding of what content was relevant, and what was most likely to get and keep people’s attention, actually improved over time,” notes Sam Seddon, who led the Watson team working on Wimbledon.
With progressively faster analysis, the Command Centre alerted the AELTC’s social teams to impending upsets, incredible rallies and other breaking news, while keeping spectators up to date on newly-broken records, such as Roger Federer’s 307th Grand Slam win against Marin Cilic.
“We actually pushed out questions to the audience, using [social media and] screens on the ground,” adds Duncan Anderson, CTO of Watson Europe. “People could reply with a slightly different hashtag depending on where they were, which allowed us to learn that people on the Hill at Wimbledon felt differently than people in the queue for the court, who in turn felt differently from the people at home. They were all experiencing Wimbledon in different ways. Understanding and responding to that varied experience is not just changing the interface, but changing the interaction between the human and the computer.”
Listening and talking to spectators is far from the only benefit Watson can bring to the world of sport, but the Wimbledon questions showed that Watson, and the cognitive learning technology he embodies, can improve the experience not just of the thousands of élite athletes in the world, but the billions of people who watch them.
Wimbledon gave IBM the opportunity to show off another of its experience-driven applications for cognitive technologies – Chef Watson. Wimbledon-inspired creations were put together based on an understanding of how flavours and ingredients interact, producing twists on classic Wimbledon recipes like a crayfish cocktail (replacing the traditional prawns).
Chef Watson can generate an infinite number of recipes, based on training provided by Condé Nast’s Bon Appétit magazine. Some of Chef Watson’s creations – from shrimp-lamb dumplings to hoof-and-honey ale – were even collected in the first cognitive cookbook, published with the Institute of Culinary Education.
Chef Watson highlights one of the aims of the Watson experience – to be approachable and valuable to a wide range of people, by addressing universal needs and working with the most natural interface: human language.
“Most of us conform to the way that our computers like to receive instructions,” explains Anderson. “We type in very specific commands or manipulate graphical interfaces. The ability to process speech and text in natural language is a key innovation in moving us forward, so that computers operate as we do.
“Allied with that is the ability for computers to learn and be taught rather than be programmed. Those things come together – the way a computer can understand natural language is by being taught by a human, rather than being configured with a set of rules about which words means what.”
The ability to ask simple questions in natural language, and receive answers based on a huge array of knowledge, intelligently ordered, is opening up a wide range of industries to the benefits of cognitive computing.
Terry Jones, the founder of Travelocity and Kayak, and Manoj Saxena, the former General Manager of IBM Watson, founded WayBlazer to create the next disruption in the travel sector.
Felix Laboy, WayBlazer’s CEO, told WIRED that applying cognitive technology to travel is in its very early stages: “If this was a football match, we’d be in the first five minutes.” However, WayBlazer is already available as a service to hotel and travel brands, to help them in transforming the way travellers can book hotels and find local attractions.
On the interface side, WayBlazer enables potential customers to ask simple questions in plain language, rather than dealing with a mass of check boxes and filters. “I’m looking for a hotel in London which is family-friendly, allows pets and has a fitness centre”, for example, would be enough to begin the search.
Watson’s ability to read and understand natural language then widens the available resources far beyond the information provided by the hotels themselves. Blogs, reviews, pictures and videos –unstructured data invisible to traditional search techniques – can all inform and refine the search. Laboy, an enthusiastic triathlete in his spare time, can ask WayBlazer to focus its search on hotels with full-sized pools, or within a short distance of one.
So, holidaymakers and business travellers can find a closer match to their needs – which may involve a hotel they would never normally consider. Meanwhile, the hotels can understand better what attracts customers, effectively following customers’ experience through thousands of information sources to see how decisions are influenced.
Cognitive computing is one of a range of transformative technologies changing the way we interact with the world – some of which have already become ubiquitous. Three in every four British adults now own a smartphone, and more and more everyday activities are moving not only online but onto mobile devices. Retailers are scrambling to adjust to an entirely new paradigm.
“Traditional capabilities for e-commerce – like keyword search, navigation and filtering – are really one-way,” notes Neil Patil, president of software products at online commerce specialists Fluid. “Currently, online shopping puts the onus on users to manually sift through page after page of products to find the right solution, creating a time consuming, impersonal experience that may not deliver the best results."
Working with IBM and Watson, Fluid has turned this process around, to make the experience of online shopping less like flicking through endless racks of products and more like talking to an expert assistant in a store.
Once again, the key is Watson’s grasp of the meaning and context of human phrasing. So, instead of searching through hundreds of models and sizes of jacket, users of Fluid’s Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) application for The North Face answer a series of questions about what the customer really needs – from the gender of the buyer to the local temperature and levels of exposure where it will be worn.
Based on those questions, an appropriate selection of clothing and accessories can be identified, narrowing the field and making it more likely that the seller makes a sale, and the buyer gets what they want and what they need with a minimum of friction – and helps the merchant to understand their requirements better next time.
“Companies are spending billions of dollars on big data analysis, to figure out how they can have a better personalised experience with each shopper,” Patil observes. “We’ve flipped that on its head. We believe that the only way to have a truly personalised experience is to have a conversation. I wouldn’t have to guess whether [a shopper] prefers blue or red – because they’ve already told me.”
One year on from launch, customers are spending three times longer engaging with The North Face when they use Fluid’s Expert Personal Shopper rather than a traditional approach. Wayblazer and Fluid are finding that creating a natural conversation, rather than making finding the right fit a problem to be solved, creates a deeper relationship and greater satisfaction.
These dramatic changes in the way systems and humans interact are just the beginning of the journey – but already unexpected benefits and applications are emerging. At Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, a Watson-powered agent is encouraging young patients to ask questions they might be too embarrassed to ask a human doctor.
Similarly, Watson announced in January of this year that it was working with Softbank, the Japanese technology company, to bring Watson’s cognitive abilities to Softbank’s “Pepper” robot companion. Watson will empower Pepper to understand nuances in social media, video, images text and other forms of data that non-cognitive computer intelligence struggle to understand. Pepper robots are already installed in shops in Japan, where its Watson-powered ability to understand conversational language offers a far more natural experience for customers than tablets or kiosks – and are now beginning to appear in homes also.
As conversational interfaces become more familiar, the experience of accessing information and services is likely to change – to offer greater accessibility, greater understanding and greater convenience.
As that experience expands to cover more industries, more applications and more interfaces, Duncan Anderson is excited by the possibilities. “It’s the ability to access a computer system that has been trained by an expert in a particular field of knowledge – and therefore being able to access that knowledge. That’s incredibly empowering in a way that I don’t think we’ve ever seen.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK