IBM launched Watson Engagement Advisor, a new version of its artificial intelligence technology system Watson. Two years after winning the quiz Jeopardy!, IBM Watson will now be used for customer service, even handling conversations with users understending their questions and providing them with adequate answers via chat, e-mail, SMS and smartphone apps.

Named after Thomas J. Watson, the first IBM president, Watson is a supercomputer originally based on 2,880 POWER7 cores that work in parallel in 90 IBM Power 750 servers and 16 TB of RAM. The DeepQA software is also developed by IBM to solve a Jeopardy! quiz in less than three seconds. The SuSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system is used to run Watson. Over time, IBM Watson has been improved and now it can run on a single IBM Power 750 server.

In the quiz Jeopardy! the contestants have to guess the right question having clues provided in the form of answers. In early 2011, IBM Watson defeated two previous winners of the quiz. In February 2013, IBM announced that Watson would be used at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in decision making about the treatment of lung cancer.

Now IBM Watson will provide through a cloud service or an on-premise installation of the system a help for the interaction with users. The first tests will be carried out by some companies such as banks, insurance companies and marketing companies. IBM Watson Engagement Advisor will be used to help the people who deal with customers to provide the best advice in the financial, marketing and other fields.

The IBM Watson system can collect information learning more and more about the needs of the customers and in this way it can provide more and more personalized responses. The customer service can be a big problem because it’s estimated that about half of the questions remain unresolved. Having an automated system to help the people who answers customers or even interact directly with tuem could significantly change the situation.

The use of IBM Watson Engagement Advisor is just beginning and is part of the IBM Smarter Commerce initiative, which aims to improve relations between companies and their customers. The growth of automation among users requires new approaches for their assistance. Solutions such as the one proposed by IBM could really bring us to interact normally with an artificial intelligence.

[ad name=”Google Adsense 300″]