Personal Assistants just got Smart

When Amazon announced their Echo personal assistants, I had to have one. And at a price point below $50, getting a dot for every room of my home wasn't going to break the bank. Of course, when Google came out with their version, I had to get a Google Home to compare. I was hooked. The hands-free instant-answer lifestyle I craved was finally here. As an inventor the voice interfaces are exciting - it's easy to see we are just getting started - there are so many opportunities for innovation in this space. Unfortunately, these assistants aren't much more than glorified search engines and new skills have a clunky interaction that has made adoption slow. They are typically made up of simple core skills like setting timers and asking about the weather and provide a internet wide query response for anything outside the scope of the defined skills.

However, last week IBM announced their version of a personal assistant, Watson Assistant, which is the first personal assistant to embrace machine learning and AI - finally a Smart Personal Assistant.

We are getting closer to the smart assistants we expect as consumers.

So, how is Watson Assistant different from the current assistants on the market? It's personalized - as a brand you can choose your own wake word to maintain your brand identify with your clients. It's not "hey Watson" to trigger the assistant, it's "hey BMW" or "hey Panasonic". Watson Assistant is private and secure, you own your client's data and it's secured on IBM's trusted cloud. Finally, IBM's personal assistant is proactive, it's trained on a corpus of data specific to your business which allows it to be laser focused on contextually relevant content. It can learn and use that context to improve and proactively provide insights before it's invoked - all while maintaining session details.

IBM also announced a partnership with IFTTT - If This, Then That. A new service for Watson Assistant will be available right alongside the over 615 existing services. This means that with a simple voice command you'll be able to fully personalize your connected services and devices. 

I'd argue it's this machine learning component, the deep industry specific knowledge that is the best part about Watson Assistant. Along with the platform announcement for Watson Assistant, we also announced Watson Assistant for Automotive. The show floor at the IBM Think conference included a Maserati in partnership with Harmon, with Watson onboard. The automotive industry makes the most sense for a first industry to focus on voice given the safety benefits of being hands free. By training the system on the owner's manual drivers and passengers will be able to ask questions about their car without thumbing through the manual. Since the car understands what normal readings should be it can determine when there is an anomaly and alert drivers, proactively, of the risks.

At THINK2018, I got to sit in the showroom Maserati with Harman and Watson Assistant onboard. Here's me doing a horrible job at hiding my excitement:

IBM has more than 750 patents in the IoT space, three times more than any other company, and I can guarantee you'll be seeing a lot more innovation in the personal assistant space as they continue to evolve and provide more value and ease-of-use for humans. We are getting closer to the smart assistants we expect as consumers.

What industry do you want to see explored with voice assistants?