Amazon Alexa and AWS reach space to help NASA get their work done quickly and efficiently

Astonishing as how it can sound, Alexa has now reached the stars by helping the USA space agency in keeping their daily task organized while processing their underlying data sets.

Tom Soderstrom, CTO and Innovation Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that voice as a platform is the next big future once they learn to talk to the chatbots and digital assistants as how we do normally with fellow beings or colleagues.

Soderstrom at the AWS Public Sector Summit said that if anyone has an Alexa controlled Amazon Echo smart speaker at home and commands it to enable the ‘NASA Mars application. Alexa will give all the right answers if asked about the Red Planet.

On the inaugural of the “Earth and Space Day,” Soderstrom said that the serverless computing comes in the picture where we no longer need to build it for scaling but for real-life work cases and get the result in cost-effective means without compromising the quality. He also added that voice as a platform offers 10 times faster result than compared to the written dialogue.

With Serverless Computing there is no need for scaling, managing and provisioning any servers and yet build and run applications efficiently. AWS is the cloud computing market leader that offers a collection of fully managed service to the client in the public sector that allows the clients and customers to focus more on the innovation of their products.

Alexa assists JPL employees to scan through 4 Lacs sub-contracts and provide the requested copy of the contract from the data set in seconds. Alexa is a virtual helpdesk that delivers information when it’s commanded without knowing where the data is stored or what passwords are to be accessed to get the data. But the only challenge that arises is to find out ways to better communicate with the Chatbots and Digital Assistants so that to aim in making voice as the powerful medium.

Pasadena is a California based Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a research and development center which is managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA that performs key robotic Earth and Space Science missions. It has nearly 6000 employees.

Soderstrom said that there are six technology waves that will initially force the developer to build a better solution before they affect the common people. The above said technological  waves are as follows;

“New Habits”- Gaming, Always connected Workplace

“Implement Artificial Intelligence” - Machine Learning, Automation, Analytics and chatbots

“Ever present Computing” – Augmented Reality, Smart devices, Mobile, IoT

"Cyber Security challenges” – BlockChain

"Software-Defined Everything" – DevOps, APIs, Networks and Open Source, etc.

"Accelerated Computing" – Serverless Edge Computing

Tom Soderstrom said that it is essential to make the right combination with the technologies stated above and move forward with the development. Cloud Computing has become the foundation for these technologies to function. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is integrated with Alexa and IoT sensors that have helped to solve queries quickly. He also said that Artificial Intelligence will not steal any job but instead, it will help the employees to carry out work more efficiently.

He added that Artificial Intelligence will alter the industries norms ranging from Retail to health care and auto and transformation and E-commerce. Industries that will not adopt the Artificial Intelligence will fall behind. Machines are 80 percent effective and even Humans are 80 percent effective and when you combine this then there will be 95 percent effectiveness.

Soderstrom warns that there will be a next technological tsunami in the form of built-in intelligence and every industry and sector has to be ready to handle that kind of wave.