Voice is the new UI

• Background

   

  A leading provider of home & office automation solutions, wanted to humanize it’s IoT products and empower even laymen to control and manage their automated homes / offices. System should be intuitive, anticipate user requests and have self learning capabilities.

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  The Challenges

   

  While adding Voice interface was the best option, processing natural language syntax in real-time was challenging. Also ensuring critical actionable information from a plethora of connected devices is conveyed crisply and control devices based on user’s commands wasn’t easy.

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  Solution

   

  TechChefs chose Amazon Alexa to Voicify home automation. Alexa was selected due to it’s superior far-field voice recognition capabilities and flexibility in developing Alexa Skills.

  To make it more robust and scalable, we architected the solution using Amazon Lambda functions as many instances can be run in parallel.

  Understanding varied user requests like “I am going to sleep” / “it’s sleep time” etc. without any specific commands was achieved using standard NLP algorithms. Amazon skill was programmed to be conversational and self learning based on user’s requests.