As technology gets more complex there is a need to make communication with electronics easier, said Senior Engineering Fellow for Honeywell International Tom Schmit about UNC-Wilmington’s partnership with his company.

Together, the University of North Carolina Wilmington and Honeywell plan to create a version of Siri—the popular iPhone assistant software—for homes.

Honeywell is a Fortune 100 Company involved in many forms of technology but is best known for alarm systems. The company turned to UNCW a couple of years ago in order to find ways to improve their products.

The whole idea is that it is becoming more complicated to interact with devices like Siri and Cortana, because they control so many things like lights, alarms and cameras, according to UNCW Associate Professor Dr. Curry Guinn. Dr. Guinn has worked in the area of language processing for 25 years and works with Honeywell in this applied research.

“The technology being developed will improve upon existing products in the marketplace,” said UNCW Associate Provost for Research and Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Ron Vetter. “There are likely many uses for these kinds of dialog-based systems, including portable devices like phones.”    

Honeywell hopes to incorporate this research into different products within the next few years according to Dr. Guinn. One example is the partnership Honeywell has with Amazon and how, according to Schmit, they plan to put this technology in Amazon’s platform Echo.

The reason Honeywell hopes to institute this technology into their electronics like home systems and electronics is because systems like Siri and Cortana can be confusing at times. Siri and Cortana do not remember things people have asked them to do, so people have to remember certain phrases to communicate effectively with these platforms. With the research being done here at UNCW, the team hopes to have a system that remembers what you say and use that knowledge in the future.

For instance, the current platform requires Dr. Guinn to speak into a microphone connected to a computer. Once Guinn speaks a command for the system, the command travels to the alarm system or lights via the internet. So when Guinn says to turn on all lights, the system completes that action.

Another reason for researching this is because, according to Schmit, more advanced technology users might feel as though the normal push-button interfaces are not fast enough or they may be confused by the pattern of buttons or phrases necessary to carry out commands.

These technological endeavors involve the work of students who get a hands-on opportunity. In May of 2015, UNCW received funding from Honeywell to support two students to help with research, and as the success of the partnership continued, Honeywell provided more funding to support a third student for the fall semester.

“Honeywell has expressed interest in continuing this project into 2016,” Dr.Vetter said. “We are working on extending our agreement with them at this time.”

Dr. Guinn said that he “anticipates this project going on for years” as there is no end to what research could be done.