Voice control

How can I talk to .tiarda?

Thanks to voice control, you can talk to your boiler to adjust temperatures or change settings. You don't have to search through menus or even go to the boiler. Because .tiarda understands you from everywhere. Simply by using the smart Bosch EasyControl in conjunction with Facebook Messenger or Google Assistant. But how does such voice recognition actually work?

From Thomas Edison to talking dragons

Speech control works when machines can understand, interpret and evaluate human speech. The basis for this goes back a long way. For as early as 1877, Thomas Alva Edison triggered a revolution with his Ediphone. The dictation machine could record and play back speech, thus laying the foundation for the history of voice assistants.

A good 100 years and many experiments later, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh developed "Dragon". This is a system that can recognise and understand speech. It has been further developed and is still the basis of virtual assistants.

The function of voice control: Simply explained

If you want to talk to .tiarda, it works according to a simple principle: You speak to a smart speaker or your smartphone, for example. The devices record your speech and compress it into a special format. They then send the data packets to server stations that take care of understanding your words. They return commands that your end device can understand and then execute.

For example, if you want to turn down your temperature using Google Assistant, you say: ".tiarda, I'm too cold!". Servers receive the information and translate it into a machine-understandable format. They send this back to .tiarda, which executes the commands and controls your smart home heating.

Voice assistants translate and understand us

The magic of voice control happens in the providers' data centres. This is where machines compile individual sounds into words and sentences. Algorithms are used to predict the following sounds using probability calculations.

However, this is only possible on the basis of large amounts of data. This is because the systems use phonetic dictionaries, transcribed words and successfully translated sentences for speech recognition. In addition, they learn with every successfully solved task.

The future lies in understanding your intentions

Today, neural networks already ensure that translation programmes sift through large amounts of data in the shortest possible time to convert speech into text. However, the future of language control goes one step further: it lies not only in translating, but in understanding intentions. This is possible with Natural Language Processing (NLP), which, briefly described, works as follows:

  • Understanding language: The speech recognition system records spoken language and analyses it. In the process, it breaks down sentences into individual components to obtain information about the topic, context or mood. Experts refer to this as Natural Language Understanding (NLU).
  • Finding answers: The system then converts the recognised commands into structured data. These help the machine to find the right answer from a possible pre-selection.
  • Generating answers: In the third step, the system generates an answer. In doing so, it uses the information it has already collected to generate human speech.

It is important to know that speech control systems only ever work efficiently in their domain. For example, .tiarda can control your heating system with Bosch EasyControl and Google Assistant. However, it does not provide information about current stock market trends or the winner of the last football match.

What you need for voice control

You would like to use .tiarda to easily operate your smart heating control? Then you first need a Bosch EasyControl thermostat. In addition, you need a terminal device with Google Assistant built-in. This can be a smartphone or a smart speaker, for example. Alternatively, you also have the option of sending commands as text or voice messages to your heating control via Facebook-Messenger . An active internet connection is also particularly important. This is the only way for Google voice recognition to work, so that .tiarda can understand and carry out your wishes.

Talk to .tiarda and benefit from many advantages

.tiarda makes controlling your heating really easy. Because via voice control you can intuitively and easily adjust your heating to your needs. One sentence is enough and .tiarda lowers the temperature in your house or in a specific room. You can set up a time programme such as the away/home mode without having to go to the heating system and ensure a warm welcome on your return, if you do come back early. As .tiarda continues to learn, it will support you with more and more tasks in the future. Is your heating gurgling or do some radiators stay cold? Don't worry: .tiarda gives you the right tips and knows what to do in case of a heating fault.