Teamcenter, Siemens’ enterprise PLM application, will benefit from ChatGPT technology, which appears to be called Azure OpenAI Service. Teamcenter will have “other Azure AI capability” as well, quite possibly AI technology that Microsoft had before its investment in OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT.
In their booth at Hannover Messe, Siemens will be demonstrating how AI-infused apps can be used in factory automation and operation by assisting in software development, problem reporting and visual quality inspection.
“The integration of AI into technology platforms will profoundly change how we work and how every business operates,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “With Siemens, we are bringing the power of AI to more industrial organizations, enabling them to simplify workflows, overcome silos and collaborate in more inclusive ways to accelerate customer-centric innovation.”
“Powerful, advanced artificial intelligence is emerging as one of the most important technologies for digital transformation,” added Cedrik Neike, a member of the managing board of Siemens AG and CEO of Digital Industries. “Siemens and Microsoft are coming together to deploy tools like ChatGPT so we can empower workers at enterprises of all sizes to collaborate and innovate in new ways.”
Creating Reports Quickly
Siemens will be integrating Teamcenter with Microsoft Teams, Microsoft’s collaboration app and answer to Slack, through a Teamcenter app that will be available later this year. With the Teamcenter app in Teams, engineers, manufacturing and production personnel can use smartphones and tablets along with ChatGPT’s ability to make quick work out of filing reports. The app will show how ordinary language phrases can be interpreted as formal, structured reports to be stored in Teamcenter, available for all interested parties. The AI will also handle language translation between German and English, and will store the English version or vice versa, depending on the company’s preference.
With Microsoft Teams, Teamcenter users will gain features like push notifications that help them keep up to date with design changes. Teams also opens up access to company data stored in Teamcenter, a PLM database, to everyone in a company, not just to the few who have been trained in and have access to Teamcenter.
Help with Coding
Siemens will also be showing the ChatGPT technology’s ability to generate PLC code. PLCs, or programmable logic controllers, are the industrial computers that control the heartbeat of almost all the factories and production facilities in the world. Because PLCs are made for a variety of functions and work in a variety of production configurations, they rely on programming to control specific tasks on specific machines.
With development skills often scarce on the factory floor, wouldn’t it be nice if code could be created simply by asking for it? This is the promise of ChatGPT. For example, asking ChatGPT to “write a PLC program to operate the stamping of a part” created the following generic (non machine-specific) code:
It is not clear if Siemens and Microsoft have created anything for Siemens’ PLC specifically as a result of their collaboration, but since Siemens is a global leader in PLCs and Hannover Messe is the biggest gathering of manufacturing professionals under one roof, the code-creating ability of ChatGPT all by itself is bound to be extremely popular.
Passing Inspection
Siemens will also be showing how it is using Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning service together with edge computers (Industrial Edge) to detect product defects and out-of-tolerance dimensions using camera-based systems.