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The Slackbot is getting a "cognitive" makeover. IBM Watson, Big Blue's big gamble on machine learning, is preparing to perform brain surgery. IBM IBM has partnered with Slack, the fast-growing workplace messaging app, to power the next iteration of Slackbot, Slack's flagship virtual assistant, the companies said Wednesday. Slack said it plans to adopt "Watson Conversation," a month-old tool that helps bots interact through natural language, for its own assistant. In addition, IBM and Slack are planning to develop new artificially intelligent chat features, developer tools, and a brand new bot aimed at assisting I.T. teams and administrators. Developers building applications on top of Slack will be able to draw on various Watson-powered tools, including sentiment analysis, which parses speech to infer emotion, and speech plug-ins, which translate text to spoken language, the company said.