Slack, IBM Partner to Bring Watson to Developers

SAN FRANCISCO - 26 Oct 2016: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Slack are partnering to bring Watson to Slack's global community of developers and enterprise users. Drawing on the power of Slack's digital workplace and the cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, developers will be able to create more offerings -- including bots and other conversational inferences -- that will transform the platform's user experience. Developers can easily access the range of Watson services -- such as Conversation, Sentiment Analysis or speech APIs -- and build powerful new tools for the platform with this enhanced cognitive functionality. As a first step, IBM and Slack intend to develop new and improved communications tools for users of the Slack platform, including an updated Slackbot to be powered by Watson and an IBM Watson-enabled bot for IT and network operations. IBM and Slack also plan to share learnings from the creation of these tools with developers as part of ongoing educational efforts, and the companies plan to offer specialized tutorial resources to accelerate how developers can tap into Watson: Slack Intends to Adopt Watson Conversation for Slackbot: To further strengthen the Slack user experience, Slack intends to adopt Watson Conversation as a technology that helps power its Slackbot -- the platform's popular customer service bot.