Speech control of drones and robots is so popular these days that a simple Google search reveals about 14 million results on the topic. However, many of these projects are meant for hands-on technical people as opposed to business or operational folks interested mainly in outcomes. Wait no more. Cisco is already in the process of enabling speech-controlled drones and bots for secure enterprise requirements. It's highly likely they'll become an integral part of Cisco's Autonomous Systems Application Platform (ASAP) in the future.

Bringing enterprise-grade security, reliability and scalability to speech- and gesture-controlled bots can unleash the real business value.

Cisco's Karan Sheth collaborated with Built.io's Nishant Patel and team to create a collection of enterprise-class, speech-controlled bots. As described in the diagram above, a user's arbitrary speech or Spark commands were delivered to Cisco's private cloud environment over Built.io's cloud and secure enterprise gateway infrastructure. Once inside the secure infrastructure, even the smallest of hardware like Raspberry Pi could execute intended workflow commands without worrying about security or access control.

On the output side, once the results were ready to share, Built.io's enterprise gateway and cloud engines were once again used to seamlessly deliver outcomes to intended recipients over a multitude of interfaces, including Spark rooms, Tropo text messages, emails, and more.

Riding on the success of this small initial experiment, the team embarked upon a generalized scenario testing as depicted below. Any set of sensors, drones, robots, business workflows, or scripts can be trigged using the same mechanism with result sharing happening in a dynamic, highly collaborative environment.

Check out a short video of a private-cloud drone flying via Google Home speech commands as well as Spark bot commands and posting the results back in the Spark room-all while seamlessly and securely transferring from Built.io's and Spark's public cloud to Cisco's private cloud devices.

Cisco's exciting co-innovation journey is creating big ideas-and big results. Join us as we continue making amazing things happen via drones and bots.