Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Ramadan 17, 1445 H
broken clouds
weather
OMAN
23°C / 23°C
EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Amazon Alexa assisting Nasa become smarter at work

1369244
1369244
minus
plus

WASHINGTON: While you are busy giving Alexa commands to play your favourite song or book an Uber, the intelligent virtual assistant from Amazon is helping the US space agency organise daily tasks while making sense of intrinsic data-sets.


According to Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), voice as a platform will become the next big thing once we learn to talk to digital assistants and chatbots in a fashion we do with friends and family.


“If you have Alexa-controlled Amazon Echo smart speaker at home, tell her to enable the ‘Nasa Mars’ app.


Once done, ask Alexa anything about the Red Planet and she will come back with all the right answers,” Soderstrom said during the Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) public sector summit here.


“This enables serverless computing where we don’t need to build for scale but for real-life work cases and get the desired results in a much cheaper way.


Remember that voice as a platform is poised to give 10 times faster results,” Soderstrom noted on the inaugural “Earth and Space Day”. Serverless computing allows people to build and run applications and services without thinking about provision, scale and manage any servers.


AWS is a marker leader in this segment, providing a set of fully-managed services to clients in the public sector, thus allowing them to focus more on product innovation.


Alexa, for example, can help JPL employees scan through 400,000 sub-contracts and get the requested copy of the contract from the data-set right on the desktop in a jiffy.


“It is kind of a virtual helpdesk.


Alexa doesn’t need to know where the data is stored or what the passwords are to access that data. She scans and quickly provides us what we need.


The only challenge now is to figure out how to communicate better with digital assistants and chatbots to make voice as a more powerful medium,” emphasised Soderstrom.


Pasadena, California-based JPL is a federally-funded research and development centre, managed for Nasa by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that carries out key robotic space and Earth science missions.


The facility currently has nearly 6,000 employees.


According to Soderstrom, there are six technology waves that will primarily force developers to create better solutions before they impact the common people.


These waves are “New Habits” (like Always Connected workplace, gaming); “Applied AI” (Machine Learning, chatbots, automation, analytics); “Ubiquitous Computing” (mobile, smart devices, IoT, Augmented Reality); “Cyber Security challenges” (like Blockchain); “Accelerated Computing” (serverless, edge computing) and “Software-Defined Everything” (Networks, DevOps, Open Source and application programming interface or APIs, etc).


SHARE ARTICLE
arrow up
home icon