Bot-X: An AI-based Virtual Assistant for Intelligent Manufacturing

In light of recent trends toward introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the Human Machine Interface (HMI), companies need to identify the key issues of the communication between operator and production machines. Despite the fact that the industrial company starts to introduce chatbots to assist the communication between humans and machines, the virtual assistant (or digital assistant) by using human natural language is still widely required in the manufacturing domain. In this paper, we introduce an AI-based virtual assistant, Bot-X, for the manufacturing industry to handle a variety of complex services, e.g., order processing, production execution. This work expands the idea in three directions. Firstly, we introduce the design motivation of Bot-X, e.g., knowledge boundary in the manufacturing context. Secondly, the design principle of Bot-X is presented, including the framework, system architecture, model architecture, and the core algorithm. Then, three scenarios are presented to test the Bot-X usability and flexibility regarding the manufacturing environment.