Chatbots could become much more useful for knowledge workers if IBM Corp. and Slack Inc. have their way.

Against the backdrop of its annual World of Watson summit in Las Vegas this week, Big Blue has struck a partnership with the communications startup to develop new artificial intelligence capabilities for Slack’s messaging platform. Their first priority is to integrate the Watson Conversation service that launched at the event yesterday into Slackbot, the default personal assistant included in Slack rooms. It offers explainers about the tool’s various features and can be configured to answer common questions such as inquiries about a chat channel’s purpose.

IBM and Slack say that Watson’s natural language processing capabilities will increase the accuracy of the bot’s responses while improving its efficiency at generating replies. Big Blue also plans on using its newly launched service to build a complementary help desk agent for streamlining organizations’ technical support operations. According to today’s partnership announcement, the chatbot will enable users to submit complaints quickly via a dedicated Slack channel instead of having to go through a separate ticketing system.

The last major element of today’s alliance is a new middleware plug-in that will enable third-party developers to create their own custom agents using Watson Conversation. To lower the learning curve, IBM will put together an application starter kit with template code, tutorials and other programming resources. The company hopes that will set its value proposition aprt from the numerous other companies that are working to ease the creation of Slack bots.

Google, for instance, acquired a startup called Api.ai Inc. last month that has developed a cloud-based toolkit for developing virtual agents. Microsoft joined the fray back in May by introducing a development framework that provides pre-packaged AI building blocks. With so many big companies  competing in the Slack ecosystem, IBM can expect a tough road ahead, though Watson’s brand recognition and broad feature set may give it an advantage.

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