Teamcenter App Poised to Accept Natural Language Problem Report

Do you wish you can talk to your PLM system in your own words? Last month's partnership between Siemens and Microsoft promises to make it possible with Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams, signaling a step in this direction.

In the announcement, the two companies said, "To enhance cross-functional collaboration, [we] are integrating Siemens’ Teamcenter software for product lifecycle management (PLM) with Microsoft’s collaboration platform Teams and the language models in Azure OpenAI Service as well as other Azure AI capabilities."

Justin DiNunzio, Marketing Manager, Siemens Digital Industries Software, clarified, "The natural language processing occurs in the Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams, which leverages Azure OpenAI Services to translate and prepopulate the problem report."

The companies expect users will rely on this function primarily for problem reports. "This means that users such as a service engineer will be able to leverage the app, which includes Azure OpenAI services, to quickly capture problems in the field or in a production environment. The user will be able to speak their natural language into their device using speech-to-text. The Azure OpenAI services will translate this to the preferred language as well as prepopulate the fields in the problem report form," said DiNunzio. 

Integrating natural language processing into design and simulation apps may also be picking up momentum. Recently at OzenCon, Ansys CTO Dr. Prith Banerjee revealed the company is working to incorporate AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT into its simulation technology.

DiNunzio said, "Siemens has been leveraging AI since 2020 via the Teamcenter Assistant, which is a command prediction system that is a part of Teamcenter’s Active Workspace UI."

The new Teamcenter app for Microsoft Teams is anticipated to be available later this year. 

Beyond the app, the partnership is also expected to bring more AI-powered functions to factory asset and process management. "Siemens and Microsoft are also collaborating to help software developers and automation engineers accelerate the code generation for Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), the industrial computers that control most machines across the world’s factories," according to the announcement.

In addition, last month in Hannover Messe, the two companies demonstrated how, using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and Siemens’ Industrial Edge, AI-powered image analysis could be be used to detect defects on the shopfloor.