A collaboration between an 11-year-old East Northport boy and his IBM inventor father has given voice to cybersecurity tools using that company's Watson artificial intelligence system. In November, Mike Spisak, whose title is chief transformation architect and master inventor, IBM Security, was joined by his son, Evan, as he worked in his basement "laboratory." Spisak was seeking to apply artificial intelligence tools to the problem of cybersecurity. He was typing to a "chatbot" -- a computer program that simulates human conversation -- in the hope that it could develop into a tool that could provide cybersecurity answers to IBM's corporate clients. That's when Evan, inspired by J.A.R.V.I.S., the AI assistant of comic book and movie hero Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, piped up: "Dad, why can't you talk to it with your voice?"

If it wasn't already clear that AI-powered voice assistants are ready for the workplace, it is now. IBM is not only launching Watson for Cybersecurity, a cognitive computing service that parses legions of security reports to extract relevant info, but is unveiling an experimental voice helper to go along with it. Havyn lets digital defense experts ask for threat updates and recommended solutions when it would otherwise be too time-consuming. If security analysts are already hip-deep in work, they don't have to sidetrack themselves with a new research path when Havyn can produce a useful answer in seconds. The combo could be particularly helpful given Watson's depth.

Last October, 11-year-old Evan Spisak wandered down to his father's basement workshop to help out on a weekend project, a time-honored tradition in homes across the country. But Evan's father, Mike, is an IBM master inventor. And what they came up with was no birdhouse or pinewood derby car. It was Havyn, a homegrown voice assistant that taps into IBM's enormous cybersecurity infrastructure, putting Watson's AI smarts at their literal beck and call. Think of Havyn, instead, as a highly specific analog to Amazon's Alexa voice assistant.