Slack Messaging Service to Add IBM Watson Smarts
26 October 2016 - 4:30PM
Dow Jones News
Slack Technologies Inc., a business messaging provider, is the
latest company to partner with International Business Machines
Corp. to add artificial intelligence to its service.
Slack plans to improve Slackbot, its customer-service bot, using
IBM's Watson, a collection of artificial-intelligence software
delivered as cloud-computing services, the two companies said on
Wednesday. The messaging company will use Watson Conversation, an
IBM service that processes natural language, to enhance the
accuracy and efficiency of the bot, which helps Slack users
troubleshoot problems.
These and other enhancements will be available to users early
next year, Slack said.
The partnership between Slack and IBM comes amid a spate of
alliances involving Watson. IBM in recent days announced
partnerships with General Motors Co. and Quest Diagnostics Inc. as
well as an expanded collaboration with Apple Inc.
IBM itself takes advantage of Slack. About 30,000 Big Blue
employees use the service, up from about 5,000 at the beginning of
the year, according to Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.
"IBM is one of our bigger customers," he added.
Together, the companies are creating software tools intended to
make it easier for coders to enhance Slack with Watson's
capabilities. For example, they plan to offer a starter kit that
provides aids such as example code and step-by-step instructions
for building on Slack. IBM will release software that lets its
Watson Conversation service, which interprets text input in natural
language, interact with Slackbot and other Slack messaging
channels.
Write to Rachael King at rachael.king@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 26, 2016 01:15 ET (05:15 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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