IBM and Slack team up to build smarter chatbots with Watson

Chatbots could become much more useful for knowledge workers if IBM Corp. and Slack Inc. have their way. Against the backdrop of its annual World of Watson summit in Las Vegas this week, Big Blue has struck a partnership with the communications startup to develop new artificial intelligence capabilities for Slack's messaging platform. Their first priority is to integrate the Watson Conversation service that launched at the event yesterday into Slackbot, the default personal assistant included in Slack rooms. It offers explainers about the tool's various features and can be configured to answer common questions such as inquiries about a chat channel's purpose. IBM and Slack say that Watson's natural language processing capabilities will increase the accuracy of the bot's responses while improving its efficiency at generating replies.