The tech giant IBM released a statement early this year of the planned integration of their state-of-the-art artificial intelligence Watson and Japan telecom mogul Softbank’s “empathetic” Pepper robot. This will enable Pepper to easily utilize Watson APIs to further increase its’ human interaction experience. Developers will be given access to the open cognitive computing technology platform through the Watson software development kit (SDK), giving them the ability to enhance their applications by using cutting-edge APIs.
In 2011, Watson was able to win one million dollars from the game show Jeopardy! – proof of the powerful AI capability of the platform. Pepper is also making news in different parts of the world. The robot is already used in cruise liners, retail stores in Japan, hospitals in Belgium, and train stations in France – providing rich user interaction and experience. Mike Rhodin, Senior Vice President IBM Watson, said that with the collaboration of cognitive capabilities and robotics, people can engage and benefit from the technology in new and exciting ways.
With this integration, Softbank’s “empathetic” robot can now be programmed to do translation between languages using Watson’s Language Translation API, analyze what Pepper is currently seeing through Visual Recognition API, answer questions intelligently by employing the Retrieve and Rank API, and a lot more. Pepper will greatly benefit from the continuous learning capability of Watson as it gets smarter as more data is gathered.
There is no release date yet as to when the Watson-powered Pepper is going to be on sale.
RGTC already has a high-caliber team developing applications for various clients in Japan. Additionally, a team of skilled and experienced developers was formed to investigate the full extent of the capabilities of Watson by developing a smart mobile application. RGTC, with its ambition to be the leading services provider worldwide, is already in the planning phase of creating applications for the Watson-powered Pepper robots.
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Image Sources
- Softbank, IBM Executives with Pepper robot: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-LZ709_pepper_G_20160107000650.jpg