LAS VEGAS—Back in 2011, when IBM's Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, all the sophisticated computer system could really do was answer questions. Fast forward five years, and it can now do 32 different things, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty revealed during a Wednesday evening keynote here at CES.
We are now, according to Rometty, entering a new era of computing, driven by systems that you don't have to program. With the help of Watson, they can now understand, reason, and learn, make hypotheses and have confidence levels.
"The Watson Internet of Things is not the future, it's here today," she said.
As proof, Rometty—with the help of partners Under Armour, medical tech company Medtronic, and Japanese banking giant SoftBank (the company behind the Pepper robot)—debuted three new Watson-powered applications.
Under Armour's new Watson-powered UA Record app, for instance, which just launched in the App Store, can already help you track your sleep, fitness, activity, and nutrition, but within the next year it'll also be able to customize workout programs for you, based on Watson's understanding of similar user's behavioral and performance trends. It'll also eliminate the painstaking task of manually entering your meals, instead taking advantage of Watson's visual recognition capabilities to quickly identify what's on your plate.
Meanwhile, Medtronic is leveraging Watson for another, perhaps even more incredible, health-related purpose: diabetes management. According to Rometty, a new Medtronic app rolling out this summer will, thanks to Watson, be able to predict hypoglycemic event up to 3 hours in advance.
Finally, SoftBank plans to soon offer a new Watson-powered version of its Pepper robot for enterprises that can make sense of hidden meanings in data that traditional computers can't understand. For instance, Pepper may in the future be able to gain insights about people from sources like what they share on social media, to better assist them in a customer service capacity. With the help of Watson, Pepper might move beyond customer service, to take on teaching assistant or nursing aide roles.
Meanwhile, the sharing of knowledge between Pepper and Watson goes both ways. Over the past year, Pepper has helped Watson become way more proficient in the Japanese language. "We partnered with Softbank to teach Watson how to think in Japanese, with the help of Pepper," Rometty said.