IBM Watson and Cisco to Build a Workmate

Another potential commercial example of virtual assistants ... Natural extension for Cisco which is already providing advanced business technologies. No cute anthropomorphic name as yet? How conversational will it need to be? Will it need to learn and retain corporate culture? Adapt to patterns of usage? Tool versus assistant? 

IBM and Cisco will make Watson into a virtual workmate
The cognitive computing engine could schedule meetings and take notes
Watson might schedule your meetings someday if a partnership between IBM and Cisco Systems bears the fruit they’re hoping for. 

In the meantime, the companies hope to save employees from some of the meaningless tasks they have to carry out just to work with their colleagues.
  
IBM’s Verse email platform and Connections collaboration suite are a good match for Cisco products like the Spark messaging app and WebEx conferencing service, so the two vendors have found ways to integrate them, company officials say. All this will happen in the cloud. They’ll demonstrate the first examples next month at the Cisco Live conference..... " 

Verse by and for Brainstorming

I mentioned IBM's new EMail idea Verse.  Now an article in the NYT about how they developed it and how they use it.  The general brainstorming approach described is similar to the way we approached idea generation and discussion.  It is common in Silicon Valley.  It can work, but I have seen it be stifling.

" ...   We did this for our new business email tool, IBM Verse, which helps workers prioritize tasks and find the right people and information quickly. We began not by declaring that we wanted to transform enterprise email, but by asking the team to think about what people dislike about email.  ... " 

Unclear then how Verse now supports this kind of brainstorming interaction.  Have not seen it demoed yet, so can be objective.  When you are not seated together and riffing ideas.  Culture does create problems with brainstorming.   Managers who understand this often excuse themselves from early sessions because they influence the process too much.  Different people contribute in person than do in e-mail.   In real-time is different than intermittent.  There is much self editing and self aggrandizement.  Visual drawing works differently on line.   How can email deal with these observations?

Mail Re-Imagined in Verse

Today from IBM.   Mail that understands you ... Imagine email that works for you instead of email that makes you work. .... Guided by analytics, IBM Verse learns your behaviors to adapt to the way you work, wherever you work. And because it's built for business, it understands you have special security and privacy needs, too. ... " .

You can sign up now.  It describes this as an analytics, not a cognitive App.  Which surprises me. But the classic cognitive function, learning,  is mentioned.

" ... Less clutter, more clarity ... Move to a bright place far beyond the mess of senders, subjects and folders.

With built-in intelligence and a user-first, user-tested design, IBM Verse offers a faster, better way to manage your communications across devices, organize inbound and outbound information, and focus on what you need most. ... " 

All good thoughts.  Would like to try, though for a heavy user changing your E-mail system can be a considerable task.  So many links between documents, contacts, mail, groups, applications.  Link to video demo.  Press release.