ARMONK, N.Y., March 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE:
IBM), the Official Cloud and AI partner for the Recording
Academy®, announced today the launch of
GRAMMY® Debates with Watson, a new digital fan experience, powered
by IBM Watson's natural language processing (NLP) capabilities and
cloud technologies. In addition to this new fan experience, the
Recording Academy announced it is transitioning its consumer-facing
online platform, GRAMMY Backstage, to a digital environment running
on IBM Cloud that will seamlessly host the preshow, the GRAMMY
Awards Premiere Ceremony®, and additional show content.
GRAMMY Debates with Watson will
run through the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards®, taking place
on March 14.
In order to design technology-driven fan experiences to engage
and attract viewers and music fans, IBM and the Recording Academy
conducted several design thinking workshops and developed an
interactive experience that use IBM Cloud and IBM Watson to enhance
the show's engagement experience. This is the fourth year that IBM
has partnered with the Recording Academy to bring the power of
artificial intelligence (AI) technology to the GRAMMY Awards.
GRAMMY Debates with Watson is a
multi-week, AI-curated music debate experience, available to fans
around the world. The experience allows music fans to contribute
their individual points of view to some of the most compelling
music-related conversations today. Hosted on GRAMMY.com, fans can
engage in debates related to the most groundbreaking artist or
biggest style icon and add their pro or con arguments, in 8–36-word
count summaries, via the online portal. As an example, one debate
topic is "Music education should be mandatory in all K-12 schools."
The input and data from the debates will be processed by IBM
Watson, and lead to "conclusions," that offer analysis on the
submissions in real time.
The GRAMMY Debates with Watson
solution taps into the strong pipeline of innovations coming to IBM
Watson from IBM Research to advance AI for business. IBM's AI for
business strategy is designed to help organizations predict,
optimize and automate processes through advancements in NLP,
automation and trust. NLP is key to interpreting the trends and
insights hidden within enterprise data. GRAMMY Debates with
Watson uses an innovation from the
IBM Research Project Debater team – Key Point Analysis – that IBM
plans to commercialize in IBM Watson NLP products such as
Watson Discovery and Watson Natural Language
Understanding. Key Point Analysis reviews fan input on the topics
posed on GRAMMY.com to identify the most prevalent points and
main topics of the submissions. Then, natural language generation
technology is used to create cohesive pro and con narratives on
each of the topics. The solution will also analyze public posts
from social networks, such as Twitter, to help inform the debates.
Using IBM Watson to analyze and synthesize natural language helps
to scale the capabilities of the Recording Academy's editorial team
so that they can produce more engaging experiences using insights
and data.
"The launch of GRAMMY Debates with Watson gives GRAMMY viewers an entirely new
way to engage with fellow music lovers and be a part of the
conversation. It's great to continue innovating our digital and fan
experiences with IBM and to explore how AI and cloud technology can
be applied to make our awards show more interactive for viewers,"
said Lisa Farris, Chief Marketing
& Innovation Officer at the Recording Academy. "We're excited
to bring IBM's expertise to the GRAMMY Awards, and the work we do
to support music creators and celebrate Music's Biggest
Night®."
"Our work with the Recording Academy is another example of how
we're applying IBM's cutting-edge technology to revolutionize the
entertainment industry and bring clients innovative and compelling
experiences for their key audiences," said Noah Syken, Vice President of Sports &
Entertainment Partnerships, IBM. "These are the same core
technologies – hybrid cloud and AI – that we're using to drive
digital transformation for clients around the world."
In addition to GRAMMY Debates with Watson, IBM announced the 63rd GRAMMY Awards
day-of-show takeover on GRAMMY.com will be hosted for the
first-time entirely on the IBM Cloud. This is a part of the
Recording Academy's journey to hybrid cloud, building modern,
containerized applications on Red Hat OpenShift. IBM will power
GRAMMY Backstage, as the digital experience is known, by using a
hybrid cloud approach enabled by Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's
leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, with workloads running on
multiple public and private clouds operating seamlessly. IBM will
be migrating the digital environment that hosts the preshow, GRAMMY
Awards Premiere Ceremony, and additional show content (articles,
photo galleries, video highlights, etc.) to the IBM Cloud. GRAMMY
Backstage will be seamlessly embedded into the GRAMMY.com homepage,
and with the IBM Cloud will be able to securely scale the delivery
of GRAMMY Backstage to the more than seven million fans worldwide,
who are anticipated to tune in.
Red Hat OpenShift and the IBM Cloud are the foundations of
digital transformation at clients like Coca
Cola European Partners. The natural language processing
innovations powering GRAMMY Debates with Watson can also be found in solutions like
Watson Discovery and Watson Assistant, used by ecosystem partners
like EY, and companies in industries including healthcare, retail,
telecommunications and more. The work IBM is doing with the
Recording Academy, and other sports and entertainment entities, to
engage fans during the pandemic, parallels the innovative
experiences and technology applications they bring to clients
around the world.
GRAMMY Debates with Watson
builds on the 2019 launch of GRAMMY Insights with Watson, an innovative fan
experience that applied AI technology to the award's pre-show. The
online and broadcast experience provided key insights in real time
about the artists on screen during the GRAMMYs' pre-show red
carpet. The solution, which also leveraged NLP to mine and source
insights, reached hundreds of thousands of live red-carpet viewers
on GRAMMY.com, and created over 1,600,000 total instances of
insights.
IBM has been a long-time partner to a range of entertainment and
sports organizations, including tennis (US Open and Wimbledon),
golf (Masters Tournament), football (via ESPN Fantasy Football),
and has consistently applied the innovation of IBM technologies to
these experiences. Through IBM's partnerships, including a recently
announced esports partnership with Blizzard Activision, the
Overwatch League, IBM is able to reimagine sports, and
entertainment experiences for fans, players and coaches alike,
leveraging the flexibility of the hybrid cloud, and other
AI-powered solutions.
The GRAMMY Awards will air March
14 at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT on CBS. To view the GRAMMY Debates with
Watson, please visit
GRAMMY.com/Watson from
March 2-14.
Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are
subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals
and objectives only.
About IBM
For more information about IBM, visit
ibm.com/news. To learn more about IBM Watson NLP solutions, please
visit:
https://www.ibm.com/watson/natural-language-processing.
CONTACT:
Angelena
Abate
Angelena.Abate@IBM.com
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SOURCE IBM