IBM joins forces with IFTTT in the name of more intelligent services-- bringing the smarts of the Watson Assistant to the IFTTT ecosystem, bringing "a way to create entirely new connections for customers."
Watson Assistant was revealed just a month ago at the IBM Think 2018 Conference. Formerly known as Watson Conversation, it is the Big Blue take on the smart assistants made popular by the likes of Apple and Amazon. However, unlike Siri or Alexa, Watson Assistant does not reside in smartphones or speakers. Instead it is aimed at enterprise applications, powering custom-built virtual assistants. As such, it is already available in customised form for the automotive and hospitality industries.
Meanwhile IFTTT ("If This Then That") is a an open platform allowing users to automate tasks across various services or cloud applications. It is based on applets, each holding a set of conditional commands, and one can combine said applets to trigger chains of actions. The service is fairly popular with, according to IFTTT estimates, 14 million consumers, 5000 active developers and around 75 million applets.
The partnership follows a $24 million investment in IFTTT by Salesforce Ventures, one backed by Chamberlain Group, Fenox Venture Capital and, of course, IBM. It will see the integration of the IFTTT platfrom with Watson Assistant, bringing further smarts to both services, as well as new IoT offerings.
"IBM and IFTTT are working together to realize the potential of today's connected world. By bringing together IBM’s Watson IoT Platform and Watson Assistant Solutions with consumer-facing services, we can help clients to create powerful and open solutions for their users that work with everything in the Internet of Things,” IBM says. “Our work together is an important step to enable true interoperability between devices as IoT becomes pervasive across business and society alike.”
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