Integration of smart speakers with a home automation functionality
Smart speakers are speakers that also have a microphone, through which you can issue voice commands. The best-known examples are currently Google Home, Amazon Echo (Alexa) and Siri (Apple).
You can also give electronic controllers a kind of home automation functionality, which is the most promising aspect for machine and appliance builders. Ever more devices are coming on to the market that you can connect to the smart speaker to operate them in this way. This is why the demand from machine and device manufacturers is rising to link their applications as well.
Voice-controlled commands operate machines and devices.
The smart speaker first always sends the voice command to the cloud, meaning a web server somewhere on the internet. That server knows which machines or devices are linked to the speaker and what possibilities they support. It decodes the voice commands and converts them into commands. These commands are then returned to the correct appliance via the internet in order to execute the command. Google Home and Amazon Alexa also have a smartphone app. In that app you also see the connected devices, so that you can operate all these things via your smartphone as well.
Test our voice-controlled demo for yourself!
To visualise and test the principle, we built a demo set-up with several RGB LEDs, a few relays and a fan, as well as a smart speaker. We equipped our electronic controller with software to operate, in this case, a fan (on/off) and lighting (on/off, dim). An important point in this regard is the way in which our electronic controller tells the cloud what it supports and also how it is secured, so that nobody else can send commands to the electronic controller.
