A hotel room can make a guest feel welcome by proactively addressing their needs once they step into the room. Watson Assistant can set the room temperature and make dining recommendations based on preferences from past stays, turn on the lights and close the blinds depending on the time of day. IBM Watson is seeking to join the exclusive club occupied by Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant. At the IBM Think 2018 conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, IBM is set to announce the Watson Assistant, an artificial intelligent advisor that the company describes as an "AI enterprise assistant." "Enterprise" is the key clue not to think of Watson Assistant has another Alexa or Siri but rather a new product tailored to IBM Watson partners.

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Orange Bank has entered the banking market with Djingo, a virtual advisor powered by IBM's Watson. "The virtual advisor brings customers a unique experience allowing them to interact with their bank when and where they want," said André Coisne, CEO of Orange Bank. For the French, mobile banking is becoming the preferred mode of interaction with their bank. Today, nearly two out of three (63%) French people have downloaded their bank's app on their mobile, and almost half (47%) consult their app at least once a week*. Orange Bank offers a new quality of customer services through a virtual advisor called'Djingo', which is powered by IBM Watson delivered through IBM Services.

The role of artificial intelligence in advertising is leaping from the experimental stage to something more commonplace, as all marketers want to reach "the right person, at the right time, at the right place with the right message." That was the impetus behind lawn care services chain TruGreen's expanded use of IBM Watson Advertising's AI tools to target specific customers with ads recommending specific offers related to local conditions. TruGreen boasts 2.3 million commercial and residential customers with 260 lawn care branches in the United States and Canada, plus about 35 franchise locations. To reach those people and businesses with a timely message about their individual lawn care needs, the IBM Watson ads takes in many factors that might come into play, such as weeds, thin grass, dryness, lack of growth, or grass discoloration. "At TruGreen, we are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to interact with consumers," said Kari Rajaniemi, Chief Marketing Officer, TruGreen.

"Orange Bank has entered the banking market with an innovative, new offer. Djingo powered by Watson is one of the bank's innovations. The virtual advisor brings our customers a unique experience allowing them to interact with their bank when and where they want," said André Coisne, CEO of Orange Bank. For the French, mobile banking is becoming the preferred mode of interaction with their bank. Today, nearly two out of three (63%) French people have downloaded their bank's app on their mobile, and almost half (47%) consult their app at least once a week*.

IBM Watson CTO Rob High has done a lot of thinking about the privacy, security, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. He presented some of those ideas at Mobile World Congress 2018, and we talked to him about some of his key findings. You can watch the interview above or read the transcript below. High said, "One of the things we have to realize about AI--it's relatively new to all of us. There's a lot about it that we don't all fully understand. Even as a technologist, we know where we're trying to bring the technology, but on the other side there's lots of people for which this technology is new. The experiences around that are going to be different. As with any new technology, it's really important that we be thinking now about how we do that ethically and responsibly. For us, that comes down to three basic principles. "What that basically means is that when you're using an AI technology, you have to trust that it's going to be doing the right thing.

IBM Corp.'s Watson is heading to space, specifically the International Space Station, in the form of an 11-pound, artificially intelligent smiling orb. The orb, dubbed CIMON, short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, will be taken to the ISS in June by German astronaut and scientist Alexander Gerst. It has been designed as an experimental assistance system to support astronauts in performing routine work. Complete with an "expressive digital face," CIMON will initially assist Gerst in running a series of tests, including an experiment with crystals, solving a Rubik magic cube based on videos, and a complex medical experiment. "CIMON's digital face, voice and use of artificial intelligence make it a'colleague' to the crew members," IBM said in a blog post Monday.

For IBM Watson CTO Rob High, the biggest technological challenge in machine learning right now is figuring out how to train models with less data. "It's a challenge, it's a goal and there's certainly reason to believe that it's possible," High told me during an interview at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Google's AI chief John Giannandrea, for example, also recently listed this as one of the main challenges the search giant's machine learning groups are trying to tackle. Typically, machine learning models need to be trained on large amounts of data to ensure that they are accurate, but for many problems, that large data set simply doesn't exist. High, however, believes this is a solvable problem.

IBM yesterday announced it would be providing the AI brain for a robot being built by Airbus to accompany astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). When only the best of the best will do, it looks like Watson has the right stuff. The robot, which looks like a flying volleyball with a low-resolution face, is being deployed with German astronaut Alexander Gerst in June for a six month mission. It's called CIMON, an acronym for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, and it's headed to space to do science stuff. It'll help crew members conduct medical experiments, study crystals, and play with a Rubix cube.