Remember Watson, the computer that won “Jeopardy!” in 2011 and made us all worry about the impending obsolescence of the human race? Have you ever wondered what it’s been up to since then?
Well, like many sudden celebrities, Watson has dabbled in several interests. It visited Capitol Hill. It penned its own celebrity cookbook. And now, in partnership with the Japanese tech firm Softbank, Watson is going to lend its brain power to robots and take on one of the greatest challenges of its development cycle: learning Japanese.
It’s a test of Watson’s technology, which — very simply put — is designed to take in huge amounts of information, process and learn from them in the same way the human brain does. Watson has already spent years picking up the weird phrases, nuances and quirks of English. But this is the first time IBM’s tried to teach Watson a language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet.
“This is a major step for us,” said John Gordon, IBM’s vice president for the Watson Group.