IBM’s Watson makes a move into self-driving cars with Olli, a minibus from Local Motors
Watson has become a key component of Olli, the self driving, fully electric vehicle produced by Arizona based company Local Motors, which specializes in 3D-printed vehicles.
Olli is a 3D-printed minibus that can be requested for a pick-up with a mobile app similar to the increasingly popular Uber. Unlike most taxis, however, these vehicles can be printed to specification in a matter of hours.
Olli can fit up to 12 people and amazingly, can act just like a regular cab driver
Watson’s uses “natural language” recognition which can help create a “relationship between the passenger” and the vehicles. There are four Watson APIs that Olli will use, they are Speech to Text, Natural Language Classifier, Entity Extraction and Text to Speech.
Among the functions that the vehicle will be able to perform as a result include analyzing high volumes of transportation data from 30+ sensors on the vehicle.
The cars will start operations first in Washington, DC, before expanding to deployments in Miami-Dade County and Las Vegas later this year.
IBM says Miami-Dade County will run a pilot to transport people around Miami using these autonomous vehicles.
Finally, a car that’s actually smarter than you! Well, unless you’re smarter than IBM’s supercomputer Watson!!
A vehicle that understands human language,
Wondering where to go for dinner? Just ask Olli! Watson software can even help you decide what type of cuisine you’d like.