IBM Sends Watson To Japan

IBM is sending its Jeopardy-winning Watson supercomputer across the world to learn Japanese. The company has teamed up with SoftBank Corp. [jp: 9984], which introduced the Pepper humanoid robot last year, to learn Japanese and develop enterprise apps that can understand and answer complex questions posed in natural language. The two organizations will initially target Japan's education, banking, healthcare, insurance and retail industries. IBM has been expanding the language capabilities of Watson's cloud-based cognitive computing system to bring it to more regions around the world. Last year, it learned Portuguese and Spanish. Shares of IBM were up 0.5% in premarket trade.