simple, natural, contact-free and reliable – this is how communication between man and machine should work. speech assistants such as alexa and siri are omnipresent in private use. in the industrial environment they are still hardly ever used.
our robot barkeeper has a voice control system: drinks can be ordered simply by voice command. the system is based on the codesys software development platform. it is controlled via an alexa echodot.
the desired drink is selected and the selection is transmitted via alexa to the system, which confirms the entry. the voice commands are evaluated online, and the values received are transmitted to the plc via mqtt. the system is based on an artificial intelligence system, which evaluates the voice commands with deep learning and thus becomes better and better in order to minimize wrong inputs.
the necessary hotwords, synonyms and alternative formulations have to be defined and configured in advance. however, the ai system does not have to take into account an exact word order or a certain sentence structure when the user enters the voice commands. the voice control can also handle colloquial phrases (natural language understanding), provided that the defined keywords are included. the user can therefore interact with the machine intuitively and without prior training, and even complex commands can be entered simply by using the familiar language.
our robot barkeeper works reliably even in noisy environments and is user friendly. the system’s application possibilities in intelligent industrial automation are versatile!
