Interested in connecting with Biren? Reach out to him on Linkedin!

About Speak to IoT: Speak To IoT is a simple, secure platform to connect smart IoT devices or enterprise workflows to all intelligent voice assistants.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(00:55) Intro to Biren Gandhi

(05:06) Intro to Speak To IoT

(09:47) What are some of the use cases of Speak to IoT?

(14:23) Where is voice going in the long term? Where do you see it being the most useful?

(20:11) What business drivers will increase the adoption of voice? What needs to happen for organizations to implement voice?

(24:37) How do you deal with fragmentation in the IoT industry? How can you ensure that companies can best utilize their existing infrastructure in new IoT deployments?

Transcript:

- [Narrator] You are listening to the IoT For All Media Network.

- [Ryan] Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the IoT For All podcast on the IoT For All Media Network. I'm your host Ryan Chacon. One of the co-creators of "IoT For All." Now before we jump into this episode. Please don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Or join our newsletter at iotforall.com/newsletter. To catch all the newest episodes as soon as they come out. Before we get started. If any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable IoT market, but don't know where to start. Check out our sponsor Leverege's IoT Solutions Development platform. Which provides everything you need to create turnkey IoT products that you can white label and resell under your own brand. To learn more, go to iotchangeseverything.com. That's iotchangeseverything.com. So, without further ado. Please enjoy this episode of the IoT For All podcast. Welcome Biren to the IoT For All podcast. How's your week going so far?

- [Biren] So far so good. No complaints.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. Well, it's great to have you. I'd love to start off by having you give the quick introduction to our audience. And let them know any background information, anything about yourself you think will be relevant. So they can get more insights into who they're listening to.

- [Biren] Absolutely, would love to. Hey guys, I'm Biren Gandhi. Founder and CEO of Speak To IoT. We are SF Bay Area company, but a global presence. My co-founder is based in India. We have a subsidiary in India as well. It's called Smart India. So essentially it's pretty much the same parent. And the idea is, as you might've guessed from the name, it's Speak To IoT. So we are in the IoT domain from the forefront, from the very inception of IoT. In fact, I was part of the team at Cisco a few years back, which actually coined the term IoT. In fact, it was IoE, internet of everything in the earlier days. So I was fortunate and humbled to be part of that core team which coined the term. Which kind of started the whole movement of IoT. So yeah I mean, while at Cisco it was a very interesting time. My co-founder and I were kind of doing bunch of experimentation. I was leading the drone charter at Cisco. Trying to find out commercial drone engagements, and opportunities for Cisco for like next decade or two. And during that time I was also in parallel leading an innovation charter, internal innovation charter. So I had launched an internal innovation challenge at Cisco. Called "Innovate Everywhere Challenge." And as part of that, my co-founder and I just kind of bumped into each other doing some experimentation. So we said, "Hey, people are flying drones." This was back in 2016. So we said, "Hey, people are flying drones, looking at their mobile phones or joysticks." I mean, essentially they're looking down while the flying machine is actually up in the air, in the sky. So it's a fragmented attention problem. Whether people should be looking down or they should be looking up where the actual machine is going. It might be bumping into something, somebody's window or tree or something, right? That's where the idea, "Hey, can we fly drones using voice?" Purely, just like no joysticks, no mobile phones. Not only based on the Alexa or Google Assistant voice commands that, "Hey, take off, land, go left, go right, increase the speed, decrease the speed." All those things. And, that went very successfully. And after that we went on doing a bunch of projects. Making autonomous robots, doing WiFi site surveys within buildings. And doing bunch of things. Purely voice controlled autonomous fully. So we said, "Hey, can we just extend this concept to anything which has electrical power." Why just limit ourselves to drones or robots, the high-end gadgets. And that's how the Speak To IoT concept was born in a way. That, hey, it is any IOT device, any internet connected or any power device for that matter can be voice controllable, can be made voice controller but in a very intuitive hands-free contactless manner. And, that's where we are three years and change down the road. We are in the process of doing this voicesification so as to speak of many, many IoT devices. Whether they're consumer IoT appliances, smart appliances, smart home gadgets, switches, lights, LEDs, fans, whatever you can think of, right? That's one domain. But not only that. Our platform, it's a software platform. Which kind of normalizes this voice interfaces for anybody and everybody. So think of it like somebody wants to better voicesify their backend process or workflow in an enterprise, in a commercial setup. We can do that too. Not just IoT devices. So the scope is pretty broad. In fact, you can do so many things of converting voice to anything. So essentially what we have built, it's a general purpose patent pending all in one platform. Which can convert any IoT device, all making process. Into a voice enabled entity. Which is compliant to Alexa, Google, Samsung Voice, and whoever comes in the future. So essentially it's a future proof platform which can cater to many different use cases.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. So talk a little bit more about kind of your target customer or what's turned into your typical customer since the company has been founded and you're going to market. Who are you kind of aiming this at? What stage of the IoT process are they usually in, and what does that relationship usually look like?

- [Biren] Yeah, would love to. So if you remember, back from the old days. In the inception days of IoT, right? IoT is kind of typically catering to all segments. People, process, data and things, right? So essentially that's the kind of a breakdown of our customer or target segment as well.

- [Ryan] Okay.

- [Biren] So on this things side, right? Anything which is kind of automated, automatable, anything which has electrical power, anything which has connectivity, WiFi connectivity. We can make it voice compatible. So any legacy appliance or consumer electronics or enterprise or corporate to verify anything. Think of any consumer device, which has WiFi connectivity, or we can provide WiFi connectivity. Also that can be controlled over voice. So that's one segment. Appliance manufacturers that is one of our target segments. People having legacy appliances want to make them voice enabled, IoT enabled, or by app enable. Yes, we can cater to them, that's one segment. Second one is, out of those people process data things. Is the process and the data, right? So that's where the enterprise workflows come into picture. Anything software and anything which requires dashboards, five clicks, seven clicks. I remember many companies, especially that was the case back in the day. Many companies in order to create a guest WiFi network, somebody in the, the company's employees, it takes about 10 minutes. And maybe 20 different clicks to just create a guest WiFi network access for a visitor, even the big pampered houses. I mean most of the companies have those kind of cumbersome experiences for their employees today's world, right? So that's just one example of workflow. If anything takes 10 minutes or 20 clicks or anything like that. I mean that is simply not acceptable in today's world. We made those things like voice enable, within 20 seconds you can just create that, "Hey, create a guest WiFi network for my guest who is arriving at so and so time." For 3 hours, 4 hours, whatever the time window is. And boom, things get done. So any corporate enterprise workflow that can be made more efficient, that's a second category from the process and data side of things. And the last, out of that people process data thing is, and the most important is the people, the experiences, right? That's where the consumer experiences, employee experiences, stakeholder experiences come into picture. People want to do various things, combining different subsystems, right? People don't necessarily think in the silos like computer subsystems think. That "Hey, here is the operational system." That only operational systems and those logistics and that dashboard is displayed somewhere. And this is supply chain, that only supply chain related things are displayed on some other dashboard somewhere else. This is production, then it's a production system, right? So typically it's a siloed integration, silo subsystems. From a system perspective. People don't think in terms of those things. People think in more holistic ways. So any kind of industrial workflow, think of an industrial workflow on a plant floor. That somebody is operating a piece of heavy machinery to showing some readings that, "Hey, this reading is off." They have to not only seek it out and say, "Hey, what was the reading?" What should be the reading? What are the diagnostic procedures? How can I refer to the manual? What can I do? How can I escalate the problem? How can I de-escalate? So all that entire thing needs to be available to that individual on the floor in a split second scenario. They should not be just scavenging for that information, right? At that critical moment in the, it should be readily available. So that's the kind of a voice application in the fourth category of making any stakeholder experience. Whether it's a plant technician, field operations guide, or even customer service rep or anything like human element of it. So any experience, make it voice powered and intuitive and natural. So that's the third category. So essentially three categories. One is appliance manufacturers. Second is enterprises willing to leverage the WiFi of their automation systems on the processes and workflows. And third is this industrial or plant workflows or customer based human powered workflows.

- [Ryan] So focusing on the enterprise side for a second. Talk a little bit to us about some of the real-world use cases and applications of the technology that you've been involved in. That you're comfortable kind of talking about publicly. Just to kind of bring it full circle of how this technology is being used to solve real world problems.

- [Biren] Oh, absolutely. In fact, we are working with a couple of corporate giants. We are technology partners for Cisco. And technology partner for Mist, Juniper Mist as well. More recently. We are approved technology partner. And we have built a few solutions with them jointly to leverage the corporate WiFi use cases. So one is the pandemic-proof campuses, for example.

- [Ryan] Okay.

- [Biren] Especially the world is getting back to normalcy, right? There are a lot of requirements about, how many people are gathering? Are they're still observing social distancing? Or they're still observing the local and county regulations. Everything is highly geographically, right? Certain things are prominent in New York, which may not be prominent in California or vice versa. So how do we ensure a smooth workflow as people are returning to offices? So one particular specific use case I would like to dive in. Is finding the population density for example. So people think of it as a, let's say university campus, any academic institution. People want to think that, "Hey, is it safe to go to the library to, handle some work?" Or is it safe to go to gym right now on campus, or cafeteria, wherever. Enclosed spaces, which might have some population, you don't know whether people are crowding at the moment. Or it is fairly empty or awakened. Where I feel comfortable as an individual. That in absence of our solution, that traditional way of doing these things is both Cisco and Juniper, and many of the WiFi, corporate WiFi providers. They have some sort of APIs in their system. Which provide the information based on people's mobile phones connecting to their WiFi network. But at least trying to connect to their WiFi networks. But at least they have some visibility into how many devices, and devices correlate into people. And how many devices are people are trying to connect to my WiFi network in any given space. So based on that they can do some triangulation and give a fairly accurate count. So in absence of our Speak To IoT voice integration platform. What typically used to happen is those institutions had to put large displays, the screens outside of those facilities. Outside of library, let's say library has three entrances. Each of these three entrants will have a giant display in the front saying whether it's red or green or yellow to enter the library. Based on the population count inside that library. What we did is we have been kind of making it highly democratized, highly de-centralized. Why do you want people to visit just outside of the door of the library in the first place? We gave that capability into people's pockets. On their own mobile phones they pull out and do a Google Assistant or Alexa App. I mean it's their choice. Whatever they like they can do. Make it quickly that, "Hey, how many people are there?" And boom the voice response comes in. That there are approximately 300 people right now. So people can find that very intuitively from wherever they are remotely. And decide for their own self whether it's safe or it's okay for me to visit a particular segment of the campus right now as we speak. So that's just one specific concrete example. Another example is locating the BLE base devices, right? The location identification. And that's popular for the hospitals and healthcare systems right now. As we are fighting. So anything which has some sort of wheels and which has shared use item, forklift or ventilator cart. Or anything you can think of. Anything which has a wheel, which is high value asset, which has a tendency to get lost or misplaced in a shared apartment. So just attach it. Add a BLE tag on that asset. And it will be passively tracked using Cisco's WiFi or using Juniper's WiFi infrastructure. And we can expose entire voice based interaction. You can find that, "Hey, where is forklift number five?" Or where is ventilator cart number two right now? And the response can show on the screen as well as on the audio. Saying, "Hey, right now it's located in building two second floor closer to Dr. James's office." That's a very, very powerful productivity solution. Entirely leveraging this corporate WiFi networks.

- [Ryan] And where do you kind of see this going longterm? Obviously voice is becoming more popular. I mean, I think when Alexa came out with the ability to ask her a question and get a response quickly. Then Siri within your phones became more readily usable. We're starting to, obviously with something like Speak To IoT, we're seeing it more in all different types of applications. But let's say like a couple years down the road, where do you see the biggest impact from the voice enablement in IoT coming from? And who is it benefiting the most?

- [Biren] That's a great question actually. That's the real business driver for the whole voice movement, right? I mean gimmicks are fine. But at the end of the day, who is gonna benefit in the long run, right? So the way I see is voice is, and I've used that in many, many times. I'm sure everybody has heard that phrase. That "Voice is the new touch." So whatever job the previous decade, the previous generation of mobile apps they were doing. Voice is the next phase of that. In fact, what I personally prefer is voice, is not just the voices, the new touch base. I prefer voices that no-touch phase. So it's a lack of touch. It's a completely contactless and more hygienic in how things have been going lately in the world, in the pandemic ridden world, right? So it's like, you don't have to touch anything in order to make things work. So it's a really, really remote operations. But in terms of benefits, what is more important with voice is, it's an app less world. And I've seen from the very first, day zero of the IoT in last decade. When we were kind of building up the momentum for the IoT in the beginning, 10 years back. Is, today if you buy any connected device, device X, device Y, Device Z. Everything comes up with its own mobile app. Now, if you think as a consumer, as a user, how many mobile apps you are going to keep in your pocket every single time you're interacting with device one, you have to remember that, "Hey, device one is controlled by app one." To pullout one on you need to familiarize, learn, educate yourself irrespect to the user interfaces of app one, how things work, how to configure. Now, forget about that. Okay, now app two, you're interacting with device two. Then you need to learn the same things about app 2. Same thing with app 3, and so on and so forth. So it's not as scalable problem. It's a human challenge. Devices are supposed to make life easier. But with this proliferation of multitude of apps, it's not happening. We haven't seen that happening. So our philosophical stance is at Speak To IoT is, let's make it an app-less word. You don't have to teach people two things, right? What to do and how to do. In the app centric world you also have to teach people how to do things. And give an app context. What we believe is you don't have to, you don't have to put that cognitive overload on people's minds. Just inform them about what to do. Don't worry about how to part, right? Let system figure it out the whole part. And voice is that power. Voice is so intuitive in nature. That it eliminates the how part from the equation, for end user. You don't have to remember how to do things. You just speak rationally that, "Hey, I want this light to turn on or off or dim or increase brightness." In whatever language you feel comfortable, grammatically correct, incorrect. Doesn't really matter. As long as you're providing enough information for system to act on it. Boom, you are golden. Doesn't matter really, right? So that's the power of voice for stakeholders, for end users back to the users of the systems. But not only that. The providers on the backend, right? Whoever is providing. So think of again, I like this analogy a lot. App versus non-app world. For any mobile app, you are babysitting, you're having an overhead of initial development and kind of operations management, security and upgrades, the API compatibility and all those things which comes as a life cycle. It goes on and on. So every time you touch something, you have to kind of proliferate, propagate throughout the app, throughout the feature set. And propagate and educate your end users, all the stakeholders. And using those changes and all. So it's an IT kind of nightmare that way. In the IoT world we are always focused on IT and OT side. So OT is like challenging enough. But IT also becomes challenging with this app based world. What voice does to that is it simplifies the IT a lot. In fact, IT overheads are so minimized. I mean IT sometimes does not even realize that there is a voice app running on that. Just to give you an example, this pandemic-proof campuses, right? So counting people, population density or locating various assets. IT had almost zero role in providing us that information. We were able to do the entire voice-based IoT applications. With zero IT support. Purely based on the existing WiFi infrastructure. No changes whatsoever. So as long as you have Cisco or Juniper Mist WiFi infrastructure. That's it, you're already done. You have no new work to be done from an IT perspective. So that way it's not only convenient, but it's much more less operationally costly. Less operational or less security overhead to manage things and remembering things and babysitting things. So it helps on both end points. One on the stakeholder user side from the experience perspective. And on the back office side on the IT, OT side from an operational perspective.

- [Ryan] And as we talk about kind of those benefits across all stakeholders. Are there any other specific business drivers that will need to be, or that are needed I guess to embrace voice in the IoT domain, kind of that voice AI in IoT. Is there anything on the business side that we haven't mentioned that is probably worth noting, that is going to be a big driver for voice to basically be adopted in IoT within organizations?

- [Biren] Yeah. Beyond this usual benefits of convenience, intuitiveness and the touchless, contactless hygienic manner or the automated manner. All those usual benefits aside, there are a few things. Right now, just like in the IoT world, the classic traditional IoT world, right? There is fragmentation among other app platforms or backend platforms. Same way in the voice world, voice AI work. There is a race going on between Google and Alexa. And Samsung is also kind of throwing in, and their names more recently. Siri was in the race, but they have dropped out. Microsoft has also dropped out practically in recent years. But I mean, new people, new players are coming in. But they are not making the devices, the IoT devices manufacturers lives easier anyway. So if a device, let's say I'm a light manufacturer, LED light manufacturer. I want to support voice. Yes, I believe in the voice ecosystem. I mean how to do it. So Alexas and Googles of the world, I mean they are leaving that burden entirely onto the manufacturing ecosystem. That, "Hey, it's your job to figure it out." "Here's our API." And that's it. That's all we provide. But the manufacturing environment is not as software friendly or even cloud software friendly, and those big entities are. There is an inherent impedance mismatch, a lifecycle mismatch that where the cloud software can change things on daily, hourly, minute spaces. Just one click and boom there you have new interface. Versus those hardware guys. The physical guy is like, it takes 12 months sometimes to make things in. And get it through the full supply chain and manufacturing line. So how do we balance this mismatch for manufacturers to support not just one but multiple voice assistants at the same time to make their life easy and consumers lives easy. So what happens is typically if this LED manufacturer decides that, "Hey, I want Alexa." So they make hard work in putting Alexa together. Alexa support maybe 6, 9, 12 months. And after that, once they release the product. They say, "Hey, we are Alexa compliant now," right? So what happens from the consumer side? Some people have Alexa in their household. Some people have Google in their household. So the Google guys are not gonna purchase this device. Because it's only Alexa compliant. It's not Google compliant yet. So entirely 50% of market is gone for this manufacturer, right? What happens if Alexa changes any API or removes some backward compatibility. They're always on the hook to make those changes, embrace those changes. And the reason repeat for Alexas and Google and Samsung of the world. The manufacturers are not actually jumping in from, the way they should be. They should be just saying, "Hey, this is awesome." "Voice is awesome, let's jump into it." But they're not. And we try, strive to make their life easier with our all in one platform. And we have filed a patent on that as well. But hey, manufacturer's life should be simpler. So use our API, our SDK to integrate once. And as a result, you get Alexa, Google, Samsung. All three for free. So three in one right away. And as soon as we support the full tone. You get the full tone also for you, the fifth or sixth. And on the consumer side the benefit is reflected. That "Hey, consumers are know free to choose whatever voice assistant they're comfortable with." They're not locked into Alexa only. Or locked into Google only. Or into Samsung only world. They can just pick and choose whatever they feel comfortable with. So it's a win-win scenario. But still, I think it's a little bit longer way to go for the ecosystem to drive adoption into this area. But that's one of the, I think key driver that needs to be unlocked in order to increase the adoption of voice AI in enterprises and industries.

- [Ryan] That makes a ton of sense. I totally follow that. One of the last question I wanna ask you is. When people think about IoT in general. The domain itself might appear relatively fragmented at times or slow different platforms, applications, connectivity, solutions. I mean, the list kind of just goes on. How are you all at Speak To IoT dealing with this fragmentation? And how are customers able to kind of leverage their existing infrastructure for that voice IoT journey that they're going down with you?

- [Biren] That's a great question as well. So, fragmentation is kind of a nature of the beast that way. Everybody's just trying out pushing just a recent example, like "Hey," right? I mean Google is pushing very hard to push Google Assistant as a voice platform. Alexa is doing the same. Samsung is jumping and joining the bandwagon, right? So everybody's trying to push their own things. And IoT world is no different. They were at some point like a hundred plus so-called platforms in the IoT, right? I mean, when you say a platform. It's supposed to be generic. And it's supposed to be componentized and modular and allowing other people to integrate with various services. But that's far from the reality. The way we are addressing or trying to address at least is trying to tackle certain key pin points. So one of them is the fragmentation on the voice side. So we have a great generic software which works with Alexa and Google and Samsung. So it's not like a question of or, it's a question of and. Somebody should be able to support all of them, not just one of them. So the decision, the barrier to entry should be low. So that's one way for us to kind of support and help the cause. Another way is the data privacy. And the data at rest, data in motion, all those aspects of IoT. So some players are always keeping things in the cloud only, no other places. We offer like multiple deployment scenarios. Yes, if you're comfortable in keeping in the cloud, we can keep it in the cloud. If you're comfortable leaving it in your own data center, yes that's also possible. As long as you know where to draw the line. So whether you want the Google Assistant voice access, or you want like the other voice access. Which is local to your data center. So we give that choice of freedom to the players for keeping their data wherever it makes sense for them. Not just shipping everything behind the firewall and some country where they have no access back. It's a high probability of hacking a bumper espionage or something like that. So we kind of help our customers take care of their data and own their data in their own way. Instead of being, getting it owned by somebody else whom they don't know or have no control over. So that's another point. And the third point is the future proofing capabilities. So usually what happens is, and we have seen in the recent, the pipeline breach, right? In the US East Coast, the oil pipeline. So a lot of infrastructure elements once they are put in place. They become old. And it's just bare minimum maintenance is performed on the systems. Both hardware and software wise. But largely they are ignored from security standpoint or from up to date software end point. Sometimes there is not space. Sometimes the players have vanished. But the way we are addressing is try to build future proofing, future proof architectures as much as possible. So by a virtue of us in the middle, in a way. And us, as I'm saying us, it's not just us. But us with our large partners as well, who are not going to vanish overnight, right? Whether it's a Cisco or whether it's Juniper Mist or other similarly large fortune 500 companies. So by joining hands and forces together in building a future proof system with some well-known well-established partner. That's another way of addressing this concern. That, hey, this is not like fly by night kind of friendship. It is an evolving, highly agile security first, a voice AI architecture for IoT. Is not just like some legacy thing which you put place today. And people ignore it. And 20 years down the road nobody knows where things are, right? It