AT&T bringing the network closer to the cloud

20.04.2012
AT&T wants to change how mobile devices are used, and the company's chief technology officer Krish Prabhu is looking for ways to deliver "intelligent" cloud services to consumers over its wide-ranging network.

One research project that exemplifies Prabhu's vision is Watson, which enables the use of voice commands not only for control, but also transcription, translation or voice-based search in the cloud. With Watson, AT&T wants to make speech and natural language processing an integral part of how users interact with smartphones.

"People want to do more with the network and can do more if the cloud is closer to them." Prabhu said in an interview with the IDG News Service this week.

The company this week released Watson APIs (application programming interfaces) so developers can add voice recognition, text-to-speech and voice-based search features into mobile applications.

"Now what we're going to do is to put Watson in the cloud, open it up, and when we open it up it will be interesting to see how people use it," Prabhu said.

AT&T's goal is to help customers achieve more on mobile devices through cloud services tied to the network, Prabhu said. But the spectrum is limited and there is a growing appetite for bandwidth, so AT&T is taking steps to deliver a wider pipe and coverage so cloud services can seamlessly talk to users, Prabhu said.