Will Apple IBM Deal Let Watson Replace Siri For Business Apps? – Tech.pinions

Partnering to address a big market opportunity -- earlier in the post: "Depending on who you ask, iPhones have nearly 50% share in US smartphones in business, for example, which is several points higher than their share of smartphones in the overall US market."

"If you’re wondering why Apple would agree to creating this potential internal software rivalry, the answer is simple: legacy. Despite earlier efforts between the two companies to drive the creation and adoption of custom iOS business applications, the process has moved along slowly, in large part because so much of the software that enterprises already have is in older “legacy” formats that is difficult to port to new environments. By working with IBM more closely, Apple is counting on making the process of moving from these older applications or data sets to newer AI-style machine learning apps significantly easier.

Another interesting aspect about the new Apple IBM announcement is the IBM Cloud Developer Console for Apple, which is a simple, web-based interface that lets Apple developers start experimenting with the Watson services and other cloud-based services offered by IBM. Using these tools, for example, lets you build and train your own models in Watson, and even create an ongoing training loop that lets the on-phone models get smarter over time. In fact, what’s unique about the arrangement is that it lets companies bridge between Apple’s privacy-focused policies of doing on-device inferencing—meaning any incoming data is processed on the phone without sending data to the cloud—and IBM’s focus on enterprise data security in the cloud."

Will Apple IBM Deal Let Watson Replace Siri For Business Apps? – Tech.pinions