STEPHANIE LUDWIG
UX and Strategy for AI/ML-led Products • Conversation Designer
Watson Assistant
Virtual Assistant Roadmap
THE WEATHER CHANNEL
ROLE: Strategic Vision
Watson Assistant was the imagined culmination of a variety of strategic AI experiences.
Five user-led products were the basis for the second iteration, which evolves into a personalized conversation experience. The vision we were building toward is a fully integrated multi-modal, proactive digital assistant including voice interactions.
Questions we wished to answer:
Do users desire a deeper more insightful experience from TWC?
Can the Watson platform perform at scale to meet the demands of our users?
Considerations:
Will TWC users want to interact with an AI assistant?
How can the TWC brand mission be best supported by Watson-based interactions? How much personalization is required to create a meaningful experience?
What are the most important interactions to validate for the North Star vision?
Utilized data, tests and launched features to build a solid base for the future state story. These include: Ask Watson Travel Bot, unified search, voice search, calendar integrations, and the cognitive homescreen.
Process
These features would evolve into a unified conversational experience, with Watson as a personalized weather guide.
North star Watson Assistant: Watson is proactive and integrated in the users daily life. Imagined as a full multi-modal experience.
Conclusion: The features created collected interesting and useful data to build toward the vision, and we were moving toward launching the chat in the TWC app. The Watson Assistant project was unfortunately sunset due to a shift in company priorities and lack of monetization opportunities.