NLP on the Edge: Voice, AI and Hardware - Robert Daigle and Andi Huels, Lenovo - Project Voice X

This is the transcript for “NLP on the Edge: Voice, AI and Hardware,” presented by Robert Daigle and Andi Huels of Lenovo, presented on day one of Project Voice X. Unfortunately the first third of this audio was corrupted so we could not transcribe that portion.

The transcript below has been modified by the Deepgram team for readability as a blog post, but the original Deepgram ASR-generated transcript was 94% accurate.  Features like diarization, custom vocabulary (keyword boosting), redaction, punctuation, profanity filtering and numeral formatting are all available through Deepgram’s API.  If you want to see if Deepgram is right for your use case, contact us.

[Andi Huels:] Does anybody wanna take a guess at this?

[Robert Daigle:] They just…

[Andi Huels:] Any other guesses?

[Robert Daigle:] We’re not afraid to take risks.

[Andi Huels:] Excellent. I… excellent answers. But the one that I noted last week, you know, with a with a giant QSR and like, Andy, we wanna bring you in. We want Lenovo to support these four POCs we have going on. So my point to you is, it’s important to leverage your technology partners. If you’re… you know, whether you’re the… whether you’re Home Depot or whether you’re Deepgram or who… an ISV, work with us. Right? Because we can optimize that. We can get you better pricing from NVIDIA and from Intel. We… and we can get you samples. We can run your POCs for free in our AI Centers of Excellence.

We can work directly with those Fortune five hundred executives, bring our executives on your behalf to talk to them. There’s a a ton of advantages to to scale with us. And speaking of scale, I mean, who hasn’t had a supply chain issue over the last year and a half? Whether it’s toilet paper or chips or whatever it is, it’s great to work with a company like Lenovo because we were… we’re Gartner top twenty five in supply chain. So we anticipate those those type of issues. And as an example, Kroger had a four year rollout, and there was no stopping the rollout to all of their stores for their asset protection solution that we enabled. And we made sure that even though there was chips issues and there were, you know, all kinds of shortages, that they didn’t miss a single store. So that’s an important reason, you know, to work with a big player like like Lenovo. I mentioned earlier we designed those… these devices around the needs of the customer. We make sure that we’re talking to the store managers and not just shipping them to them with your software in a… our in our in our infrastructure. We make sure that it’s designed around the needs of the customer.

[Robert Daigle:] And one of the things I’ll say here is that in every in every deployment that we’ve done, it’s typically an ecosystem play. It’s not one provider. If you look at some of the data points out there, it’s typically four to five providers that are engaged in one deployment, whether it’s a GSI —

[Andi Huels:] Mhmm.

[Robert Daigle:] — whether it’s expertise from the customer, whether it’s a hardware providers, software vendors, and the channel partners that are actually in the last mile. So it’s important to to to realize that it’s it’s gotta be a complete ecosystem. When you get into these larger deployments, there’s not just one vendor that’s doing everything. Right? It’s it’s an ecosystem play.

[Andi Huels:] Absolutely. So this is a use case that I alluded to a little earlier at the QSR, and you can see what we’re doing related to NLP and voice to text. So when the car arrives at the drive-through, it detects the car, and then it… here’s this… the customer speak, you know, whatever the order is. I don’t wanna give away who the customer is or the end user, I should say. So they speak to the voice agent, and it puts their order up on the screen, whether you’re talk… you know, speaking in Swahili or Dutch or Hillbilly Georgia. Right? It recognizes what you wanna order, so you don’t have that, you know, drive-through attendants squawking your order back at you and it’s wrong. You have to go back and forth.

So what are we doing? We talked about this earlier, reducing friction for the customer. And so then it decodes that, it displays it on on the screen, and then the or… the customer can see their order and and just simply say, yes. That’s correct. And then sends it to the POS system within the restaurant. So this is gonna really speed up, I think, accuracy as, you know, as well as just speed up the experience through the drive-through. And just this recent close is really already… my my phone is blowing up off the hook for other companies that really wanted to do this type of technology. So that’s another reason. If you have a similar technology, like, maybe your technology adds something else to this process, we have the the connections to help you get heard.

[Robert Daigle:] Yeah. And and that that goes back full circle to… I think, the beginning of our presentation, we talked about AI becoming pervasive across businesses and the way that it has transformed our personal lives.

Very soon when you go to a fast-food restaurant, when you go through the drive-through, you may be talking to a voice assistant, conversational AI assistant when you’re placing your order to improve the order accuracy and the speed at which they’re moving customers through their queue. So there’s a lot of benefits.

And then, of course, when you’re putting that infrastructure in place, the next thing is is what next? What’s the next thing we can do with the infrastructure we’re putting in place? So, you know, it’s it’s it’s really exciting to see this transformation that we’ve seen over the past eighteen months. I know we’re we’re running short on time, so one last thing before we close out is, you know, we talked about a lot of the things that we’re doing from our our product teams from Lenovo to deliver new AI solutions with our partners. So that’s more of what we do for our customers, how we support our customers, and then we also support internal… our internal customers.

One of our recent acquisitions was Motorola, and and we actually support their data science team from our innovation centers where they’re training systems to do data mining on device device data. We have a lot of our support systems that we’re doing. We’re actually moving over to conversational AI assistance to improve both external support, so how we support our customers in that in that tier one support experience, and then also on the internal support. So Lenovo is a sixty three thousand employee company, and so that’s a small city, right, in North Carolina. That’s a that’s a decent-sized city from where I’m from in North Carolina. And so that’s a lot of people that we have to support inside of Lenovo, from IT issues and beyond as we actually use, you know, these AI systems internally as well. It’s not just something that we’re talking about with our customers, but it’s also we have to, for lack of better terms, eat our own dog food and and actually use some of these systems internally. And it’s a great way to vet the the the systems that we take out to our customers.

[Andi Huels:] Thank you so much for your for your mindshare today. It’s been a privilege to be with so many innovators and visionaries in the audience, and I look forward to speaking with you additional, like, events tonight and throughout this this week. And please come to us with your questions and your opportunities.

[Robert Daigle:] Yeah. We look forward to meeting with all of you. Personally, I’m just excited to actually be seeing people that are not on a Zoom or a Skype call and be able to actually spend some time with all of you, and what a great event. Thank you for hosting us and having us here and inviting Lenovo.

[Andi Huels:] Thank you, Robert.

[Robert Daigle:] Thanks, everyone.