IBM's Watson Lets You Talk to Your Self-Driving Car

What makes Olli, the car that's now rolling through the streets of National Harbor, Maryland, important isn't that it drives itself, that it's electric, or even that Local Motors made it from 3-D printed parts. What sets Olli apart is its gift of gab. Upstart automaker Local Motors and IBM teamed up to create the autonomous van-like shuttle, which launches today, carries twelve passengers, and uses the tech stalwart's Watson supercomputer to chat with passengers. That may seem a step down from fighting cybercrime, predicting the weather, and whooping human butts at Jeopardy!, but it's a clever use of Watson's cognitive speech capabilities to solve one of the more devilish problems blocking our path to a world of autonomous vehicles: How to make people trust them. As they ride around Local Motors' facility a few miles down the Potomac from Washington, DC, passengers can hit a button and ask Olli questions.