IBM's Watson will power in-game voice command for Ubisoft's upcoming release of Star Trek: Bridge Crew during an experimental Beta period later this summer following the game's launch on May 30. Bridge Crew provides players the first opportunity -- ever – to use their voice, in natural language, to interact with their virtual Starfleet crew members. IBM's new "VR Speech Sandbox," the software used to build this feature, is now available for all developers to adapt for their own virtual reality (VR) applications and services. The Sandbox combines IBM's Watson Unity SDK with two services, Watson Speech to Text and Watson Conversation. Developers now have the opportunity to build new and innovative user interfaces, leveraging the power of voice interaction in virtual reality. In-game speech experiences, built with IBM Watson for Star Trek: Bridge Crew will be available this summer in Beta for cross-platform play.

The key to efficient starship management, as Captains Picard, Kirk, and Janeway have demonstrated, is communication. With Romulans closing in fast and Klingons on the starboard bow, you can't be mumbling orders from the captain's chair -- you need the kind of commanding presence to inspire blind devotion in your crew. And now you'll be able to hone those command skills in virtual reality. Star Trek Bridge Crew -- the VR game that puts you in the slip-on space shoes of a Starfleet officer -- already emphasizes vocal communication when you're playing with real humans, but it will soon allow you to use your voice to issue orders to computer-controlled characters, too. The feature has been made possible using IBM's VR Speech Sandbox.

IBM Watson's artificial intelligence platform will enable voice commands in Ubisoft's Star Trek: Bridge Crew virtual reality game. IBM and French video game developer Ubisoft have partnered to include Watson's interactive speech and cognitive capabilities in a VR game for the first time when Star Trek: Bridge Crew launches on May 30 on the Oculus Rift with Touch, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR (PSVR). It's another one of those wonderful confluences of technology and games that we highlighted at our GamesBeat Summit event. With IBM Watson, Star Trek: Bridge Crew will provide players the opportunity to use their voice and natural-language commands to interact with their virtual Starfleet crew members. This feature is part of a strategic partnership with Ubisoft.

Ubisoft's Star Trek: Bridge Crew won't just put you in a VR starship when it finally launches. It'll also give you the power to interact with the virtual Starfleet crew with your voice. The company has teamed up with IBM to add Watson's interactive speech capabilities to the game, so you can tell a crew member to launch a missile -- and maybe even pompously add "make it so" in the end -- instead of using manual controls. Bridge Crew was supposed to launch last year but was plagued with numerous delays. It's now scheduled to come out on May 30th for the PC and PS4, with Watson's voice commands to follow later this summer during a Beta period.

A new study releases this week by UK-based Juniper Research supports our prediction that chatbots will redefine the customer service industry, with healthcare and banking industries expected to benefit the most. The new report titled "Chatbots: Retail, eCommerce, Banking & Healthcare 2017-2022," estimates that chatbots will help businesses save more than $8 billion per year by 2022, which is a huge increase from the $20 million estimated for this year. Call centers and customer service departments should already be investing in these new conversational technologies if they want to stay competitive and cost-effective as companies across industries grow their investment in building chatbots to help service customers faster, across any channel, device or platform, 24 7. Advancements in technology continue to transform customer service interactions. From improvements in loyalty and brand reputation to new revenue streams, the pathway to real-time self-service in customer service brings huge opportunities to forward-thinking businesses. Juniper also forecasts that the success rate of bot interactions in healthcare sector, completed without the assistance of a human agent, will increase from the current 12% to over 75% in 2022.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Monday that IBM's artificial intelligence unit Watson should one day take the place of humans. "I would think the biggest value will come in when it actually replaces human labor, and machines don't come round annually and ask for higher wages, and they don't need health care, and maybe a little maintenance," Buffett said on CNBC's "Squawk Box." "It should replace people in a big way, unless some other products do the same thing," he said, noting Watson's potential for reading X-rays faster and better than humans. Buffett told CNBC last week he owned about 81 million shares of IBM at the end of 2016 and sold off about a third of that stake in the first and second quarters of 2017. "Watson is a pretty amazing invention," Buffett said. "I'm sure the revenue is growing very significantly but from a very small base."

IBM isn't at the forefront of artificial intelligence, Social Capital CEO and founder Chamath Palihapitiya told CNBC on Monday, and he certainly isn't a fan of IBM's Watson. "Watson is a joke, just to be completely honest," he said in an interview with "Closing Bell" on the sidelines of the Sohn Investment Conference in New York. "The companies that are advancing machine learning and AI don't brand it with some nominally specious name that's named after a Sherlock Holmes character." "I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something," Palihapitiya added. "I put them and Oracle in somewhat of the same bucket."

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can recognize your speech like Siri or identify images like Facebook, but these types of machine intelligences are built on statistical approximation, using loads of data to make educated guesses. Though statistical approximation was a significant technological advancement for devices, experts at Future Lab's AI Summit in New York City believe that it is time to expand the bounds of artificial intelligence--to democratize it--by "engineering knowledge." For Puri, that is the next level of AI--its ability to not only say what something is, but to reason and understand the intent of its being, to answer the'why' question. "Working with kids gives you grounding. They ask questions because they are not shy," says IBM Watson's Chief Architect, Dr. Ruchir Puri, in an interview with EdSurge.

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Until now, creative minds have been human. But IBM's Watson, not content to use its computing power solely to cure cancer or cook you dinner, has added filmmaking to its repertoire. The cognitive computer turned up at the Tribeca Film Festival to do what so many in the industry were doing there: networking with peers to get ideas for new projects. IBM used the festival to kick off its Storytellers With Watson competition, which calls on creative types to submit a one-minute video that details how they believe Watson can assist them with telling stories through film, web content, gaming, augmented reality, or virtual reality. To generate ideas, IBM held an event in New York City last week to demo some of Watson's most creative work, like making a chilling trailer (below) for the AI horror movie Morgan and artistic contributions to an Alex Da Kid song.