The success of IBM’s Watson versus two humanoid champions on TV’s Jeopardy! game show is having a predictable ripple effect. Late night monologues and radio commentaries are fixated on the inevitability of mankind coming under the control of computers that have demonstrated clear superiority in virtually all aspects of life that matter. This item on NPR’s All Things Considered captured the spirit of growing paranoia, as signified by its title: “The Dark Side of Watson.” On another NPR show, “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” host Peter Sagal asserted, “What’s weird is none of us humans were actually interested in watching the show, but all the nation’s DVRs recorded it anyway.” (or at least that’s how it was transcribed.)

Along a more serious vein (literally), IBM’s researchers are joining forces with speech technology specialist Nuance Communications to use IBM’s “Deep Question Answering (QA), Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities” in conjunction with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) solutions (not to mention its life-like speech synthesis) to provide hospitals, physicians and payers access to critical and timely information. Doctors and professionals at Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine are collaborating with IBM and Nuance. Physicians at Columbia and helping to identify some specific incidences where Watson’s technology can be of greatest use and doctors at Maryland are helping with user interface design.

The two companies expect the first commercial offerings from the collaboration to be available in 18-24 months. It is part of a much larger joint development effort that is described in this press release from IBM’s Web site.

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Tags: speech processing, Nuance, IBM, Recombinant Communications, Artificial Intelligence