BMW and IBM have announced a partnership that will see Watson in the BMW i8.

Watson is a kind of personal assistant. The system is capable of answering questions posed in Natural Language. Watson was developed in IBM’s DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. This deal is part of a $3bn attempt by IBM to be part of the IoT.

Watson’s inclusion in the i8 will allow drivers to communicate with the car in natural language. The system will be integrated into the vehicle at a lower level. For example, the manual will be baked into watson, allowing the driver to ask for assistance without taking eyes of the road.

“Got a question about how your i8 is performing? Ask your i8 just as you would talk to a friend, and your i8 will reply. Watson will learn the i8 owner’s manual and with the natural language capabilities to be able to understand the driver’s questions, he’ll understand what you’re asking and provide answers in a conversational style,” the post said.

As part of the same deal, BMW will park 4 of the futuristic sports car at IBM’s Munich IoT headquarters. Not because they look good, but to test prototype functions and other features. Though they are quite pretty, too.

In the fight for relevance in the future, German car makers won’t just give it up to the Silicon Valley companies. The companies are pushing as much as possible towards self driving cars, and smarter cars in general. We are seeing them sign partnerships, pushing forward this agenda. BMW teamed up with Intel and MobilEye to bring autonomous vehicles back in July.

Source: IBM Blog

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