The voice control of Alexa, Siri, Cortana and Co conquers after the private household now the industry. A natural voice input of data or voice control of commands without a keyboard makes people work better with the technology. We implemented it for Amazon Alexa as a skill for oee.ai customers.
Voice input as a natural user interface
The sales figures are not communicated in detail by either Amazon, Google or Apple, but at the end of 2017, Amazon revealed that several tens of millions of echo devices have been sold to Alexa’s voice business. That is much.
The overwhelming majority of the smart speakers are in private use and announce the weather report, play playlists or order books. But the potential is huge for business applications as well. For example, the development of intuitive user interfaces in the context of Industry 4.0 is gaining momentum. People engage in direct dialogue with the machine or the IoT platform, allowing them to communicate with the equipment in a natural way.
Alexa answers questions about the OEE
How well the voice control works on the example of the status query of the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is shown in the following video in German (English version of the solution is in progress).
Without having to adjust his language explicitly to Alexa, humans can have a natural conversations about plant productivity, request comparisons or quantities. All this without interrupting its actual activity and without resorting to a keyboard or touchscreen.
This use case supports production management in asset productivity management. The logical extension is the speech input of loss reasons for the shop floor employee during an equipment shutdown. Thus, the relevant inputs can be made without tools must be put out of hand and thereby extends the repair time.
Voice control becomes another operating standard
In 2014, Amazon was the first to launch Alexa speech technology on the market. Many large tech companies have followed suit with other products. And voice input has the potential to establish itself alongside the keyboard and touchscreen as the operating standard in the industry. There are numerous scenarios in which it is useful to keep both hands free and still use a computer. Systems like Alexa make this possible with the latest artificial intelligence technologies that are not just being used in industry.