IBM Withdraws Standalone Assistant Solutions from Market

As a Dev tester of the system, received the below.  Implications?

Dear valued client,

We want to share with you some important upcoming changes to the future direction of our Watson Assistant Solutions offering.

On May 14, 2019 , IBM will withdraw Watson Assistant Solutions from the market. This includes Watson Assistant for Connected Vehicles, Watson Assistant for Connected Spaces, and Watson Assistant for Connected Platforms. IBM has already stopped accepting new orders for Watson Assistant Solutions, and we will not be adding any new features to the offerings.  Your service will not be interrupted, and you will continue to receive support in accordance with your service agreement.

We're taking the bold move to focus our future efforts to embed Watson Assistant into our strategic enterprise offerings - Maximo, TRIRIGA, engineering, and IoT Platform.  As a result, we will no longer be supporting a stand-alone platform for enterprise AI assistants. We believe this enables us to bring the greatest value to our industrial clients.  

We are committed to working with all our clients and partners who want to continue with a stand-alone conversational assistant product to determine the right solutions for their continuing needs.  Customers and business partners will be able to work with us to handle their subscriptions and contracts once the end of service announcement is published to provide a smooth transition.

Thank you for your interest in Watson Assistant Solutions. 

IBM Watson Assistant Solutions, Offering Management

A ChatBot Asset Exchange

Brought to my attention by the talk this morning on Bots integrated with AR/VR . Slides here.  The slides include instructive videos.  IBM Sponsored.  I will extract some additional examples.

Some interesting examples of Bot use, coding and design, and a means to exchange examples:

Bot Asset Exchange
Your community-driven chatbot development hub.  (via Anamita Guha 
 @anamitag of IBM)

Discover, configure, deploy, and be rewarded for bots built with Watson Assistant. Join the revolution--build a chatbot today.   ... "

Watson Assistant Produces a Chatbot

IBM has announced a means of chatbot development, via their Watson Assistant infrastructure.  Recall I beta-tested the Dev under Watson Assistant.  The offer here, as I read it, is a one year free supported trial to built a chatbot using this approach.  The precise meaning of the 'chatbot' here is unclear, but I would assume it includes access to current Watson Assistant services.  Such as emotion detection  (anger) mentioned below.  Retail is mentioned but seems not restrictively.  Limitations of memory and access interactions. Looks like a good thing to try.

IBM Watson Assistant: the fast and easy solution for all your clients' cognitive needs.  Integrate an AI-powered chatbot at no cost for 12 months.

Create a cognitive retail chatbot

Learn how you can create an easily configurable, retail-ready Watson assistant-based chatbot that lets a user find items to purchase and then add and remove items from their cart.

See the code pattern

Create a cognitive banking chatbot

Use IBM Watson Node.js SDK to create a chatbot that includes conversation interaction, anger detection, natural language understanding, and answer discovery. ... 

See the code pattern

It’s estimated that chatbots for customer service will help businesses save $8 billion per year by 2022. ... "

IBM Says Data, Utility Key to Voice

Having been involved in a test of IBM voice systems, this view is interesting.  Its a new channel that many people are using, so marketers must understand it. 

IBM says data and utility are the keys to brand success in voice
Chief digital officer Bob Lord talks about the perceived limitations of AI assistants—and the vast potential.... " 

Integrating Watson Assistant

I was an early examiner of Watson Assistant, you can even build a skill for Alexa with Watson Assistant!  Useful introduction:

Integrate Watson Assistant With Just About Anything  by Mitchell Mason in Medium

Additional credit to Laksh Krishnamurthy for his contributions to the content and diagram

Watson services on IBM Cloud are a set of REST APIs. This makes them quite simple to be used as a piece of a solution within an application. It also means they need to be integrated with various other parts of the solution to allow your users to interact with your instance of Watson. With the launch of Watson Assistant, integrating with other channels (Facebook, Slack, Intercom) has never been easier. 

Building a skill for Alexa is possible with Watson. While we have published a number of assets to assist in this effort, like the Watson SDKs, API reference, sample applications, and other users have contributed GitHub repos as well, many of our users still ask how to integrate with other channels or specific external systems. If you are not familiar with the Watson APIs, you can sign up for IBM Cloud here.

While it would be physically impossible for us to provide instructions on how to integrate with every single possible integration point on the planet, there is a general outline that nearly all integrations follow that I hope sets our developers up for success when they need to integrate with something new. .... "

More on Watson Assistant

More on the announced service.  This piece is interesting because it lists some specific current companies playing in the space with Watson.  Chatbot style interactions in a number of business interactions rather than in the home.

IBM’s new Watson Assistant targets business with ‘white label’ service 
The newest voice-activated A.I. assistant differs from Alexa, Siri, Cortana and others with a white-label service approach that works in the background.  .... 

 ... Other potential customers for Watson Assistant include connected device manufacturer Harman, a subsidiary of Samsung that has created a digital cockpit system fitted into a Maserati GranCabrio, and Royal Bank of Scotland, which will use the A.I. assistant in contact center calls. Greenstein also pointed to a deployment at Munich Airport, where Watson Assistant is embedded into a Softbank Pepper robot that answers questions and provides guidance for travelers, such as where gates are located and why a flight might be delayed. .... " 

By Matthew Finnegan      Senior Reporter, Computerworld  ... 

IBM Watson Assistant: Business Skills as Intelligence Architecture

Have now had a few month look at the Watson Assistant in Beta.   Also have had three years learning with the Amazon Echo and a year plus with the Google Home.    So the comparison is quite interesting.  Watson Assistant is very much a 'white label', a system designed  to be installed in other, more complex things like cars or hotel night stands or Hospital rooms.   Or even a tiny part of your IOT.   Not to say that the Echo and Home's have not also crept into other devices.  And both now have a considerable lead in implementation.

What Watson Assistant does now have is the ability to link to Watson meta skills that have already been built for Watson.   Conversation,  Discovery and  Personality detection are just a few of dozens.  In the future also Blockchain.  Some are arranged in industry functional groups:  Say Financial, Supply chain or Retail.   So you should be able to look up just the  intelligence 'skills' you need and apply it to your need, in API fashion.  Mix and match them like parts of a business brain.  And then you get the skill functions to augment business needs.

And these needs .... like understanding speech, speaking to you, linking to information on the Internet and communicating with the IOT, and performing typical business transactional interactions are all there. But how to attach them is still not clear.   For example the Discovery Watson Skill, which lets you ingest private information and then interact with it intelligently,  is still to be connected.  Similarly business capabilities, like Business process modeling , are also possible future available methods.

IBM has gotten closer to making useful business oriented capabilities useful as skills.  Better than Home or Echo.   Closer to having a true assistant.   So if developers and startups line up to produce meta-skills that will deliver business value, we may see great things.  It remains to be seen if IBM Watson has the architecture to make it the place to do that.   Or should the developers just write a business value from the ground up?   Looking for new examples.

 IBM’s Watson Assistant lets any company build Alexa-like voice interfaces

You get a voice assistant, and you get a voice assistant, and you  By James Vincent   @jjvincent  in TheVerge.

IBM is today launching Watson Assistant, a new service aimed at companies looking to build voice-activated virtual assistants for their own products. Want your hotel’s rooms to remember a guest’s preferences for air-con? Or your car’s dashboard to be controllable via voice interface? IBM’s message to companies is: we can help you build that.

It’s an interesting pitch, especially as voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa are being integrated into new arenas. (See, for example, the Wynn Las Vegas’s decision to install Echoes in every room.) IBM says this shows the popularity of conversational interfaces, and believes companies should choose Watson Assistant over Alexa or Siri for a number of reasons — namely: branding, personalization, and privacy.

First, Watson Assistant is a white label product. There’s no Watson animated globe, or “OK Watson” wake-word — companies can add their own flair rather than ceding territory to Amazon or Apple. Second, clients can train their assistants using their own datasets, and IBM says it’s easier to add relevant actions and commands than with other assistant tech. And third, each integration of Watson Assistant keep its data to itself, meaning big tech companies aren’t pooling information on users’ activities across multiple domains. .... "

IBM Delivers a Watson Voice-Powered Assistant

Been looking at this in Beta for some time.  More detail to follow.

IBM delivers Watson-powered voice assistant for consumer brands
   
Alexa and Google Assistant have taken residence in people's homes. IBM aims to give companies a way to deliver their own branded AI voice assistants

IBM has launched Watson Assistant, an artificial intelligence (AI) powered voice assistant for businesses.

Organisations showcasing the Watson Assistant include speaker maker Harman, retail bank Royal Bank of Scotland, Autodesk, Munich Airport and Motel One.  ... "
 

Watson Assistant Introduction

I was invited to be a beta developer in this space.  Here IBM competes with Amazon, Apple and Google for a place in adaptable, cognitive, skills based systems.    I like in particular that IBM is emphasizing how all these systems will be IoT style applications and plug into devices that need their capabilities.  I in particular will be emphasizing process improvement and optimization applications.  And opening the development of these skills to anyone.   Here is a starting introduction:

Watson Assistant Builder

Developer Docs for the Watson Assistant Builder

What is the Watson Assistant?
Watson Assistant is a technology that was designed to create personalized and engaging experiences with digital assistants for consumers. It is designed to be easily customizable and integrated into devices such as mobile apps, cars, rooms, and other connected objects. It understands context from history and real world sources to enable a delightful conversation and truly helpful recommendations. ...  "

More on classification of assistants and upcoming public presentations .... 

Watson Assistant in the Power of Your Hand

Today we completely expect intelligence to be in the palm of our hands.  We can get it, but the means at hand now is repeated search.  There have been a number of attempts, interesting but hardly complete.  I have been reading Scoble and Isreal's new book: Age of Context, which covers what this is expected to look like.  I have used Siri, but it has only been useful for the most 'hands free' moments.  Will IBM Watson provide solutions to the hand held assistant problem?  In particular because of its attention to natural language interaction?