IBM's Watson teams up with Nuance and medical schools

April 07, 2011

IBM has found another use for supercomputer Watson besides beating human competitors in Jeopardy! According to a press release from the tech corporation, IBM is teaming up with speech recognition software company Nuance to develop a high-tech system for healthcare organizations.

The use of IBM's Deep Question Answering, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance's speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding solutions can help in diagnosing and possibly treating patients in healthcare facilities, the press release explains. The supercomputer's ability to analyze human language and quickly process information can be a great help when it comes to decision-making for those working in the medical field.

The addition of Nuance's speech recognition to Watson's system means that specialists can conveniently go through patient transcriptions alongside current reference materials and gather information for an efficacious diagnosis and treatment.

Other organizations contributing to the research include the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Columbia University Medical Center, which could identify which medical field the Watson and Nuance systems could contribute to the most

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