Siemens made a splash at Hannover with several announcements. Some I listed last week. This one is AI and Chatbot. Another one was made by the software group. I am working on that one. Had a number of questions on it.
This news highlights further enhancement of Siemens’ long-standing relationship with Microsoft. In brief:
- Siemens’ new Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams to use AI, boosting productivity and innovation throughout a product lifecycle
- Azure OpenAI Service powered assistant can augment the creation, optimization and debugging of code in software for factory automation
- Industrial AI to enable visual quality inspection on the shop floor
Using AI to power software development is something Apple developers hope to see next month in a release of Xcode. They say that this will be a powerful tool to enhance programming.
Siemens and Microsoft are integrating Siemens’ Teamcenter software for product lifecycle management (PLM) with Microsoft’s collaboration platform Teams and the language models in Azure OpenAI Service as well as other Azure AI capabilities.
“The integration of AI into technology platforms will profoundly change how we work and how every business operates,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “With Siemens, we are bringing the power of AI to more industrial organizations, enabling them to simplify workflows, overcome silos and collaborate in more inclusive ways to accelerate customer-centric innovation.”
For example, service engineers or production operatives can use mobile devices to document and report product design or quality concerns using natural speech. Through Azure OpenAI Service, the app can parse that informal speech data, automatically creating a summarized report and routing it within Teamcenter to the appropriate design, engineering or manufacturing expert. To foster inclusion, workers can record their observations in their preferred languages which is then translated into the official company language with Microsoft Azure AI. Microsoft Teams provides user-friendly features like push notifications to simplify workflow approvals, reduce the time it takes to request design changes and speed up innovation cycles.
Siemens and Microsoft are also collaborating to help software developers and automation engineers accelerate the code generation for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), the industrial computers that control most machines across the world’s factories. At Hannover Messe, the companies are demonstrating a concept for how OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other Azure AI services can augment Siemens’ industrial automation engineering solutions. The showcase will highlight how engineering teams can significantly reduce time and the probability of errors by generating PLC code through natural language inputs. These capabilities can also enable maintenance teams to identify errors and generate step-by-step solutions more quickly.
