Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IISThe customized voice assistant solution for German industry meets European data security standards
Voice assistants based on artificial intelligence (AI) that comply with European data security standards are an important future prospect for many companies. Under the leadership of Fraunhofer IIS and Fraunhofer IAIS, the SPEAKER project has been developing a German voice assistant platform since April 2020. Funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action as part of an AI Innovation Competition, the goal of the project is to provide infrastructure, technology components and standards for voice-controlled dialog systems for business-to-business (B2B) applications.
Natural interaction with technology via language is becoming increasingly important in many sectors. In the field of medical care, for example, voice dialog systems can make it easier for doctors to consult patient data without using their hands, operate medical devices without touching them and document diagnoses by means of voice input. In industrial settings, voice assistants offer big advantages for the digital inspection and quality assurance of machines, vehicles and infrastructure. And service and administration processes can be structured more efficiently with dialog-based assistants. In all applications, however, it is vital to bring technology and data sovereignty into perfect harmony.
In the B2B environment in particular, companies will be able to adapt the voice assistant technologies available on the platform to the specific technical terms, workflows and requirements of the respective industry. This will enable the project partners of major industrial companies, SMEs, start-ups and research institutions to employ AI methods in their immediate environment. The data sovereignty of personal and company-relevant information remains solely with the German companies and complies with European data security standards.
In close consultation with the subsequent user groups, the project partners are developing initial pilot applications, which are being tested directly in practice. The prototypes are meant to be tranferred into production immedately after the three-year project phase.