Practical Challenges of Virtual Assistants and Voice Interfaces in Industrial Applications

Abstract

Virtual assistant systems promise ubiquitous and straightforward access to information, applications, and physical appliances. Their foundation on intent-oriented queries and support of natural language makes them an ideal tool for human-centric applications. The general approach to build such systems and the main building blocks are well-understood and offered as off-the-shelf components. While there are prominent examples in the service sector, other sectors such as the manufacturing and process industries have nothing comparable. We investigate the practical challenges of building a virtual assistant using a representative and simplified case from of knowledge retrieval domain. A qualitative study reveals two significant obstacles: Firstly, while systems can be tuned to tackle the most relevant types of question tasks, user acceptance is lower than for comparable GUI-based systems and, secondly, a disproportional amount of effort to get all details and having a robust system. Overall, implementing a virtual assistant for an industrial application is technically feasible yet requires significant effort and understanding of the target audience.

Putting humans back in the loop: An affordance conceptualization of the 4th industrial revolution

“…A small but growing stream of scholarly literature examines related phenomena (Diederich et al, 2019; Robert, 2018; vom Brocke et al, 2018), including the perception of gender (Obinali, 2019), usage contexts and behaviour (Mallat et al, 2017), user satisfaction (Sohail, 2020), industrial applications (Gärtler & Schmidt, 2021), and supervisory relationships (Mantello et al, 2021). As machines extend their capabilities from merely engaging in interactions to developing relationships with humans, new phenomena and new damage will undoubtedly emerge.…”

Development of an Industrial Safety System Based on Voice Assistant

“…Studies and research have been conducted on applying voice assistants in the industrial area [2]. Talking about Industry 4.0 and its technologies allows thinking about a new form of interaction between humans and machines within an industrial environment, as is the case of intelligent voice assistants, where user voice commands can be recognized, understood, and processed to give a response based on a request [3,4], allowing us to achieve a more collaborative and familiar environment, since more natural communication typical of human beings will allow more efficient and understandable interactions. In this way, ref.…”

“…In industry, the development of these applications is increasing the trend to eliminate screens and keyboards, allowing the operator to have both hands free to engage in other activities while giving orders to the production system [4,6]. In [2], the authors propose an industrial voice assistant based in Raspberry Pi3 integrated into an industrial modular architecture system to compare results achieved from the actual process with a virtual digital twin of the system.…”