Jochem

“The Dome project aimed to have a voice controlled smart office device. This allowed us to experiment with this new technology. The goal was to create a personalized working space with adjustable light and sound, simply controlled by talking to the device. We analyzed available technologies and com- pared a few different architectures. We decided to use the Amazon Alexa framework combined with a raspberry pi for our demonstrator. This setup allows you to create your very own voice user interface (VUI) to control custom hardware integrated with the great range of native applications for mail, weath- er …. This project catalyzed my in- terest on this topic and gave me the opportunity to take the stage at last year’s Innovation Day of Verhaert and be a guest lecture at the Plan- tijn Hogeschool on conversational user interfaces.”

“I’m deeply convinced and passion- ate about applying the advance- ments of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence to product innovation. Voice and conversa- tional user interfaces are a great instance of this. Speech is arguably our most natural way of commu- nication* and humans have been longing to control products with a mere utterance of words forever. I see proof in this every time I start cursing at my computer when it doesn’t perform as I wish. All jokes aside, conversational user inter- faces are a tremendous opportu- nity for us to double down on our mission to create products that are user centered and natural to use and interact with.”

* For those who would argue that visual communication is the most natural way of communicating, we have you covered too because we are also experimenting with machine vision technologies.

“For a novel technology with this level of potential it’s always tempt- ing to start dreaming about imple- menting it everywhere all at once. However, we are faced with the challenge to match this technology with actual user needs to exploit its true power. To do this effectively, there are still a lot of lessons to be learned: what constitutes a good voice user interface, when is it the preferred user interface? No one knows the answers yet. This rep- resents the perfect playground for us as a product innovation compa- ny and I’m sure we will have front row seats to see how the future unfolds.”