Following on from an earlier story, where I introduced some common patterns used to build chat bots, we're now going to look at building some of those patterns using IBM Watson. If you haven't used the Watson Conversation service before, you may want to read about the basics of building a bot with Watson in "Getting Chatty with IBM Watson". One of the things I talked about was providing guidance at the beginning of the chat. To provide this before the user says anything you can add a "conversation_start" condition to a node. You can add more conditions to "conversation_start" nodes if you want to have different introductions depending on some external factor, e.g. from your app you could pass in the time of day in the context, and then say "good morning", "good afternoon" or "good evening" depending on that value.

Being the world's largest online-only grocery supermarket with over 500,000 active customers means we get the opportunity to interact with people all across the UK on a daily basis. Ocado prides itself on offering the best customer service in the industry which is one of the many reasons why our customers keep coming back. Since Ocado doesn't have physical stores, there are mainly two ways our customers and our employees interact directly. The first (and probably most common) is when our drivers deliver the groceries to the customers' doorsteps; the second is when customers call or email us using our contact center based in the UK. Today we're going to tell you a bit more about how a customer contact center works and how Ocado is making it smarter.

Doctor House is going electronic. Medics charged with diagnosing the kind of extremely rare diseases that Hugh Laurie's consultant routinely spots in TV drama House have found that artificial intelligence can do a similar job – but in seconds rather than days or weeks. From December, doctors at the University Hospital of Marburg's Centre for Undiagnosed and Rare Diseases (known as ZusE in German) will start using IBM's Watson to speed up their diagnoses. In 2011, Watson famously won the gameshow Jeopardy! Doctors are now training it on peer-reviewed rare disease literature to help them spot unusual illnesses.

You read that right – it's not Sherlock saying it this time! IBM Watson's cognitive computing capabilities and superhuman intelligence stand it in good stead to switch roles with the legendary fictitious detective Sherlock Holmes who could crack the most mind-boggling of mysteries, find answers to the unanswered questions everyone had and draw insights from information in a way no one could even fathom! For those of you who aren't yet familiar with IBM Watson, it is a technology platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data. It has refined cognitive abilities to quickly understand context, learn from experience and draw inferences and insights from a sea of information that would otherwise be humanly impossible to wade through. This is way beyond mere data-matching or search engine functions – Watson uses advanced ways of inferring context, meaning, implications and fallouts of the voluminous content it indexes in its operations.

Open-source auto company Local Motors is constantly redefining itself. The company began with the Rally Fighter, whose designs were crowdsourced from the Local Motors community. The firm then jumped into the 3D printing industry, first 3D printing the Strati concept vehicle and then embarking on a complete line of 3D-printed road-ready cars, set to hit highways in 2017. At the grand opening of the company's new facility in National Harbor, MD, Local Motors redefined itself once again by unveiling "Olli", the first self-driving vehicle powered by IBM Watson. Watson will allow the auto to take advantage of a number of advanced cognitive computing capabilities, including the ability to answer questions from the vehicle's passengers.

In 2014, IBM launched the Watson Developer Cloud, making the power of cognitive computing available to developers across the world through a set of APIs on IBM's BlueMix platform. We've seen volumes of applications built by companies covering everything from personal health and fitness to travel and entertainment to financial services. It was amazing to see these early adopters jump onboard and showcase the power of cognitive computing. We want to make it even easier for developers to learn how to build and deploy cognitive applications – and even more importantly, to distinguish themselves for having developed these critical skills. That's why today, IBM is announcing a new program -- the IBM Watson Application Developer Certification -- designed to help developers all across the world build and validate their skills as well as connect with companies looking to leverage their unique talents. We watch every day as individuals explore and apply Watson in new ways -- from building natural language interfaces in a variety of languages so consumers can get answers faster to helping doctors uncover critical new insights from medical imagery.

Enterprise search leader Lucidworks is tapping into the IBM Watson Developer Cloud platform for its Fusion platform, an application framework that helps developers to create enterprise discovery applications so companies can understand their data and take action on insights. Today's knowledge workers face an avalanche of data and documents. Lucidworks' Fusion is an application framework for creating powerful enterprise discovery apps that help organizations access all their information to make better, data-driven decisions. Fusion can process massive amounts of structured and multi-structured data in context, including voice, text, numerical, and spatial data. By integrating Watson's ability to read 800 million pages per second, Fusion can deliver insights within seconds.

Google has released an update to its Google Photos app with four new features made possible by machine learning. Today we're bringing you four new features for Google Photos -- three new ways for you to relive and the share moments that matter, and a quick way to fix some of those pesky sideways photos in your collection. Here's a look at the new features... 1. Google Photos will now help you rediscover old memories of the people in your most recent photos. As your photo library continues to grow, we hope that features like this one make it easier to look back at your fondest memories. If you take a lot of photos of your child, for example, you may occasionally get a card showing the best ones from the last month.

IBM just made another major step toward getting its Watson supercomputer into hospitals around the world. Siemens and IBM Watson Health are teaming up in something they're calling a five-year "global strategic alliance" to bring Watson to population health -- a concept that's aimed at improving the health of people in an entire community, not just those in the hospital needing immediate care. The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the partnership. Siemens is a German industrial company which, in addition to a healthcare branch (dubbed Siemens Healthineers), also works in energy and transportation. The partnership basically just gives Watson a chance to reach out to a lot more people who provide healthcare, as according to Siemens, the company is involved in more than 70% of "critical clinical decisions" thanks to Siemens instruments.

IBM Australia is looking to maintain its first-mover advantage in the burgeoning enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) space by putting more resources behind its cognitive drive. The vendor has spent 2016 arming its commercial operation with a new team that has the industry domain knowledge to drive Watson harder into specific verticals. Its local Research team has revealed involvement in cutting-edge projects for IBM's nascent Watson Health business, as well as around neuromorphic computing, which is seen as the next evolution of Watson. Since IBM created the US 1 billion ( 1.3 billion) Watson Group in 2014, the vendor has been selling business on the benefits of cognitive computing, while at the same time trying to create as many applications and use cases for the technology as it can. While these efforts were initially internally-driven, the growth of Watson over the past two years has increased the number of people and organisations working with the technology, with a growing amount of this work being done behind the scenes.