After private households, voice control from Alexa, Siri, Cortana and the like is also conquering industry. Natural language input of data or voice control of commands without a keyboard allows people to work better with technology. We've implemented it for Amazon's Alexa as a skill for OEE.AI customers.
Voice input as a natural user interface
The sales figures are not being communicated in detail by Amazon, Google or Apple, but Amazon provided insight at the end of 2017 that tens of million Echo devices were sold for Alexa's Voice Business. That is a lot.
The vast majority of smart loudspeakers are used privately and announce the betting report, play playlists or order books. But the potential is also huge for business applications. As a result, the development of intuitive user interfaces in the context of Industry 4.0 is gaining momentum. People enter into direct dialogue with the machine or the IoT platform and can therefore communicate with the equipment in a natural way.
Alexa answers questions about OEE
The following video shows how well and naturally voice control works using the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) status query as an example.
Without having to explicitly set their language to Alexa, people can of course have a conversation about plant productivity, request comparisons or quantities. All this without interrupting your actual activity and without using a keyboard or touchscreen.
This use case supports production management in managing plant productivity. The logical extension is the voice input of fault reasons for the shop floor employee in the event of a plant downtime. In this way, the relevant entries can be made without having to remove tools and thus extend the repair time.
Voice control is becoming another operating standard
In 2014, Amazon was the first to launch Alexa voice technology. Many big tech companies have followed suit with more products. And voice input has the potential to establish itself as an operating standard in industry in addition to keyboards and touchscreens. There are numerous scenarios in which it is a parking table to have both hands free and still use a computer. Systems such as Alexa make this possible with current artificial intelligence technologies, which are not only spreading in industry at this point.