Research done at the Metropolitan Museum in New York found that nowadays people spend only 17 seconds on average looking at an art-piece. To fully enjoy art we needed to change the way we experience it.

We then created “The Voice of Art”, a project in partnership with tree majors museus in Latin america. Museum visitors could use an exclusive app to literally talk to seven art pieces of the collection, asking them whatever they wanted, the way they wanted; the response was given by Watson through its portuguese and spanish voice in real time and natural language, explaining subjects such as the history behind the piece, art techniques and styling, and even the relationship with current topics. It was a creative and unprecedented idea that not only brought museum visitors’ experience to a new level and also made the average time people spend with art grown to 180 seconds.

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; 4 new client opportunities for IBM, including another big museum, what proves that the results were positive in different spheres. And the most important: made the average time people spend with art grown to 180 seconds.