Skip to main content

Brain transplant: Watson AI to make Slack’s chatbot smarter

Introducing Watson Virtual Agent
IBM’s Watson supercomputing AI, which previously beat human competitors at Jeopardy and even edited its own magazine, is set to impart some of its wisdom to another automated system: Slack’s chatbot. It’s all part of IBM’s new Watson Virtual Agent effort, which allows Watson’s intelligence to be imparted to all sorts of human interface scenarios.

While the idea of having conversations with artificial intelligence might seem like a gateway to a Skynet future, chatbots are seen as a massive growth industry in the coming years. Employed by the likes of Facebook, health care institutions, and even public service websites. Watson is ahead of the curve in this area, so applying its level of conversational ability to something like Slack makes a lot of sense.

Recommended Videos

As it stands, Slack’s helper bot is rather simplistic. It can answer basic questions about how to use Slack, and can allow you to set reminders or searches through the help system for you to find relevant information. It’s handy, but hardly versatile. The idea behind the Watson implementation is to broadly increase its functionality.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Related: Watson makes its debut in the U.S. Open mobile app, making tennis fans smarter than ever

It will become more capable of answering complex queries, and will enable the chatbot’s communications to appear more lifelike and conversational (thanks Engadget).

This is just the start of Watson’s global rollout. After the Slackbot has been upgraded with its new intelligence suite, Slack and IBM will share their findings with other developers, making it possible for anyone to use the Watson Conversation API. That way, any number of developers can create new and intelligent chatbots.

IBM is already working on a new chatbot that could act as a network administrator of sorts, answering questions outages, network integrity, and more. This should take some of the load off of real network administrators, and also provide better and faster information to those who might need it.

Jon Martindale
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
Amazon plans to spend an estimated $100 billion on AI in 2025
AWS sign in Javitz Center NYC.

AWS sign in Javitz Center NYC. Fionna Agomuoh / Digital Trends

Amazon spent $26.3 billion in capital expenditures during the fourth quarter of 2024, and that is "reasonably representative" of what it plans to spend each quarter of 2025, CEO Andy Jassy said during the company's Q4 earnings call on Thursday. The "vast majority" of that spending will reportedly go towards Amazon Web Services and AI development.

Read more
Turns out, it’s not that hard to do what OpenAI does for less
OpenAI's new typeface OpenAI Sans

Even as OpenAI continues clinging to its assertion that the only path to AGI lies through massive financial and energy expenditures, independent researchers are leveraging open-source technologies to match the performance of its most powerful models -- and do so at a fraction of the price.

Last Friday, a unified team from Stanford University and the University of Washington announced that they had trained a math and coding-focused large language model that performs as well as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 reasoning models. It cost just $50 in cloud compute credits to build. The team reportedly used an off-the-shelf base model, then distilled Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model into it. The process of distilling AIs involves pulling the relevant information to complete a specific task from a larger AI model and transferring it to a smaller one.

Read more
Sundar Pichai says even more AI is coming to Google Search in 2025
Google Search on a laptop

Google will continue to go all in on AI in 2025, CEO Sundar Pichai announced during the company's Q4 earnings call Wednesday. Alphabet shares have since dropped more than 7% on news that the company giant fell short of fourth-quarter revenue expectations and announced an ambitious spending plan for its AI development.

"As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 is going to be one of the biggest years for search innovation yet,” he said during the call. Pichai added that Search is on a “journey” from simply presenting a list of links to offering a more Assistant-like experience. Whether users actually want that, remains to be seen.

Read more