NY TIMES
 
IBM and SoftBank Telecom have agreed to bring the technology behind Watson — the IBM computer that won the television game show “Jeopardy!” — into Japan.
 
It is a significant technological achievement, since Watson’s question-and-answer capabilities had to be adapted from the English-speaking world to Japanese language and culture.
 
IBM, which last year set up a business home for Watson in New York, wants SoftBank’s help in developing a range of cognitive computing capabilities. Cognitive computers are machines that perform such human-seeming tasks as parsing language, interacting in sympathetic ways and deducing important contextual information from huge amounts of data.
 
Among the most intriguing possibilities are those in next-generation robots. Early potential uses include automating teachers’ assistants in a classroom to answer students’ questions, or using robots in hospitals to aid patient care. SoftBank Telecom is among about 1,300 subsidiaries of SoftBank in Japan and overseas, including Sprint Nextel in the United States and Yahoo! Japan.
 
SoftBank Telecom will also distribute, resell and host IBM’s technology, and will try to enlist independent developers to build new features and products, an IBM executive said.
 
“This will help us accelerate and advance the use of cognitive technologies in new parts of the world,” said Stephen Gold, vice president of IBM’s Watson Group. “It’s bigger and broader than a single thing.”
 
Naoyuki Nakagaki, a spokesman for SoftBank Telecom, said in an email that his company would look to the Japanese-enabled Watson to “create new value in the Japanese market.” The company expects to make both business and consumer products.
 
“We believe Watson will help differentiate SoftBank Telecom’s product offerings among telecommunications and other commoditized services,” he said by email.
 
The IBM-SoftBank announcement follows an agreement in December between General Electric and SoftBank, enabling the Japanese company to use and distribute G.E’.s big-data analysis technology. That technology is used for machine-based industrial applications, like predicting the performance of power-generation turbines in peak weather.
 
Mr. Nakagaki declined to comment on the relationship between the G.E. deal and the IBM deal.
 
Mr. Gold saw a common usage developing down the road. “What they are doing is around predictive technologies,” he said. “It’s very complementary to what we’re doing.”
 
Correction: February 10, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of a spokesman for SoftBank Telecom, He is Naoyuki Nakagaki, not Nakagawa.