SAN FRANCISCO - 24 May 2016: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is collaborating with Twilio, the cloud communications platform for developers, to introduce two new offerings, IBM Watson Message Sentiment and IBM Watson Message Insights, which will be available as Add-Ons in Twilio’s recently announced Marketplace.

Pre-integrated with Twilio’s APIs, the new Watson offerings are now readily accessible as “Add-ons” to the more than one million registered developers in Twilio’s community, in addition to the developers who currently access Watson technology via Bluemix, IBM's Cloud platform.

The new Watson Add-ons offer additional message enhancement capabilities through natural language processing to help understand sentiment, keywords, entities and high-level concepts from text messages. The insights gleaned from this unstructured data will give businesses actionable insights. The capabilities include:

• IBM Watson Message Sentiment: using sentiment analysis, the new service allows users to retrieve sentiment from SMS in a scalable manner. For example, a customer service manager would be able to easily analyze customer SMS messages to determine whether they are positive, negative, and neutral, to help to assess a customer’s satisfaction with a brand, service or product.

• IBM Watson Message Insights: using a combination of sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, entity extraction and concept tagging, this capability allows developers to distill key meanings from SMS. For example, a developer would be able to extract trending topics and match specific products or services to certain sentiments.

Add-ons are pre-integrated technologies available through the Twilio Marketplace that allow developers to do more with the Twilio API, and are designed to make it easier for developers to integrate with other platforms and technologies. The new offerings complement the more than thirty Watson services currently available from IBM. Future plans include extending these offerings on third party platforms, like the Twilio marketplace, bringing cognitive to where developers work. The Watson Speech to Text Add-on, as part of the Recording Add-on category, is up next for Twilio developers.

“We are committed to equipping all developers, everywhere, with self-service AI and IBM’s cognitive capabilities, backed by the best science, ease-of-use and scalability. We are motivated by what developers are creating with Watson technology, and are constantly seeking new ways to help them build and innovate,” said David Kenny, general manager, IBM Watson. “By joining the Twilio Marketplace, we have opened another avenue for many more developers to harness the power of Watson.”

“Add-ons make it possible for developers to do more with their Twilio applications using less code,” said Patrick Malatack, VP of Product at Twilio. “The IBM Watson Add-ons apply Watson’s sentiment analysis capabilities to customers’ text messages at scale, better equipping businesses with insights into how their customers feel. We’re pleased that customers can now add the functionality of IBM Watson in a single click.”

These new services are the latest example of IBM’s commitment to empowering the developer community to build cognitive-enabled apps and businesses with Watson. They build upon IBM's open Watson platform that offers cognitive APIs in the areas of Language, Speech, and Vision available through BlueMix, IBM’s Cloud platform.

IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing

Watson represents a new era in computing called cognitive computing, where systems understand the world the way humans do: through senses, learning, and experience. Watson continuously learns from previous interactions, gaining in value and knowledge over time. With the help of Watson, organizations are harnessing the power of cognitive computing to transform industries, help professionals do their jobs better, and solve important challenges.

To advance Watson, IBM has three dedicated business units: Watson, established for the development of cloud-delivered cognitive computing technologies that represent the commercialization of "artificial intelligence" or "AI" across a variety of industries; Watson Health, dedicated to improving the ability of doctors, researchers and insurers and other related health organizations to surface new insights from data to deliver personalized healthcare; and Watson IoT, focused on making sense of data embedded in more than 9 billion connected devices operating in the world today, which generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily.

For more information on IBM Watson, visit: ibm.com/Watson and ibm.com/press/watson. Join the conversation at #ibmwatson.

About Twilio

Twilio's mission is to fuel the future of communications. Developers and businesses use Twilio to make communications relevant and contextual by embedding messaging, voice and video capabilities directly into their software applications. Founded in 2008, Twilio is privately held and has over 500 employees, with headquarters in San Francisco and other offices in Bogotá, Dublin, Hong Kong, London, Mountain View, Munich, New York City, Singapore, and Tallinn.