Silvan Pushes Voice-first strategy for home automation

Encouraged by its initial success in enabling voice controlled home automation systems, Silvan Innovation Labs, a Bangalore based company focusing on developing simple and meaningful IoT enabled automation products and solution for homes and enterprises, is aggressively pushing its Voice-First strategy for the home automation solutions it is providing.

Voice control is allowing more and more people to embrace home automation solutions as it makes the interface to those systems simple, hands-free and intuitive.

The use-cases enabled by voice-assisted automation go beyond just nice to have. There are situations where a person's hands are occupied doing something else, or the person might have mobility issues due to medical reasons, or might just find using app for anything way too complex. Silvan is seeing the results of enabling voice assisted automation with several of its customers.

In one of the installations done in the house and elderly person who has just gone through a knee-replacement surgery, that person is thrilled that he able to handle several of his daily chores like controlling lights, AC, etc. without having to move around or use the phone app.

"Till recently, interaction with machines has been done in a really abstract, complex and unnatural manner. Voice is the only natural medium of communication," observed Ajay Gupta, the co-Founder and key person driving Silvan's architecture and voice strategy.

Similarly, in an installation in an up-scale hotel done by Silvan, the guest can just say "Alexa take me to CNBC", and the system switches on the TV, changes the channel to CNBC and sets the lights in the room appropriate for TV watching. This takes care of one very common problem faced by the travellers that they do not know the channel numbers of the programs they wish to watch in the TV system installed in the hotels.

Buoyed by its initial response from its customers, Silvan is planning to roll out several voice-assisted kits in the coming days where the only mode of interface with be voice. These will be very simple kits which are designed to handle one simple task in a home or hotel in a very effective and seamless manner.

The limitations of app based controls have been very evident to Silvan from the beginning, so it was very quick to seize that opportunity and was one the first in India to start deployment of voice-assisted automation system.

"Century long 1800s industrial revolution was built over snail mails, Journals, publications and newsprint. Speed of internet and faster communication made IT revolution happen in a decade. Next revolution will unleash voice as communication interface with machine. Silvan's know-how on Human Machine Interface for Voice Control will provide much need platform for next breakthrough," said Ajay.

Silvan has been offering upgrades to voice assistance to its existing customers also. Several of its customers have been opting for that upgrade, thus proving the latent need for it. Usage complexity has been one of the main things causing friction in home automation adoption, and its early market results suggest that this barrier will be finally broken by the voice-assisted systems.