Pinacoteca’s curators picked a selection of art pieces from the permanent collection of the museum that covered the history of Brazilian Art for the past 120 years. Together with the Watson team, the curators spent 6 months teaching the system everything about the art pieces: it’s history, authors, curiosities, context, relation to today’s events etc. We developed an app with Watson Cognitive Capabilities and through a beacon system it recognized where the users were and to which art piece to talk to. All the experience with the app and within the museum was created considering a broader audience so it could be used by anyone: from 10 to 100 years old. And Watson learning didn’t stop at the release of the project - it will continue learning with users, throughout the entire period in which it will be available at Pinacoteca.

First we had to teach Watson about the art-pieces, gathering data from books, critiques, biographies, old newspapers and current events related to the pieces, then we spent 6 months feeding this data to Watson.

Then for the interaction to happen, we developed a mobile app that uses all of Watson's cognitive power.

The Speech to Text API was natively installed into the application to convert the question audio into text.

This transcript is sent to the IBM cloud where the system runs the Conversation and Natural Language Classifier APIs to understand the intent of the question, selects the response from the gathered data, and returns it to the application. The application then transforms the text into audio and returns it to the user.

As the project is open to the public and receives real interactions from visitors, the larger the number of samples (questions) the more intelligent the Watson gets.

Earned media valued at US$ 3.3 million; more than 50 local and international PR stories, including a 4-minute segment on Brazil’s leading soft news TV show; highest organic reach (+1M) and engagement rate (37% - our average is 3%) on the history of IBM Brazil’s Facebook page; +6M views on YouTube and Facebook to date, being +280K organic views; 340% increase on the number of Pinacoteca’s visitors week to week; due to its huge success, the project was extended for a 2 extra months. But more than that, it has already delivered business results: 4 new client opportunities for IBM, including another big museum, what proves that the results were positive in different spheres.