IBM and SoftBank Telecom Corp., a subsidiary of SoftBank Corp, announced a deal to bring the cognitive computing system Watson to Japan. This collaboration will lead Watson to learn Japanese. Among the possible ways to interact with people there could also be a robot named Pepper.
It seems that IBM is trying to develop applications for Watson in all fields. The company is working even in the medical assisting doctors and researchers in the field of research and treatment of cancer. Its main uses are, however, in business, with various forms of assistance to employees and customers. The agreement with SoftBank goes in this direction.
The purpose of this new partnership is to offer new applications and services of Watson in Japan. IBM intends to expand the ecosystem that is creating in the USA by creating a similar one in which various partners and developers apply Watson’s potential in new ways. However, to do this the system of cognitive computing must learn Japanese.
So far, Watson has only used the Latin alphabet, to be able to read Japanese is a challenge. The Japanese language uses different writing systems that are structured in different ways: hiragana and katakana are syllabic while the kanji used logograms and is therefore more complex. There’s also the romanji system, which uses the Latin alphabet to write Japanese.
The Watson system will have to learn not only the meaning of all the characters and the many existing words in Japanese but also all the grammar and syntax complexities of using different writing systems. Characters can have different meanings and different pronunciations depending on the context and this increases the difficulties in learning Japanese.
The Watson system’s ability to analyze enormous amounts of data in a short time is a significant help in its task. Understanding Japanese, it will be able to work with SoftBank’s staff and customers, which is a telecommunications corporation. The services offered will be developed for the specific needs of the Japanese market and this also means that the interaction with people may be via robot, taking advantage of the fact that in Japan they’re very developed.
Pepper is a humanoid robot that was built exactly to be able to interact with humans by Aldebaran Robotics, a company acquired by SoftBank in 2013. In order to live together with humans, Pepper was programmed to be able to understand emotions. A synergy between a robot of this type and the Watson system could give really interesting results.
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