Makino brings voice assistant technology to EDM machines

Auburn Hills, Mich. — You know all about the Alexa voice assistant for your house. Now machine tool maker Makino Inc. is on the cutting edge of voice activation for industrial machinery.

Makino now offers the voice-activated technology, called Athena, on its wire EDM machines — and is working to extend Athena into the company's milling machines and sinker EDMs, Andre Ey, vice president of die/mold technologies, said in an interview at Makino's suburban Detroit facility in Auburn Hills.

Makino, with headquarters for the Americas in Mason, Ohio, near Cincinnati, introduced the voice-controlled machine assistant at the IMTS show in September 2018.

Makino is the first manufacturer to adopt and provide Athena, company officials said. Athena was created from iTSPeeX, a manufacturing technology startup in Cincinnati. Ey said iTSPeeX's location near Mason made Makino a good early partner.

You can ask Athena questions, and Athena can prompt the operator. That makes voice-assist ideal for new operators — or from Makino's perspective, experienced machinists who are not well-versed with Makino equipment.

"We had one example at a beta site, that they had a brand-new operator that was used to an EDM wire machine, but not a Makino brand. So he had no prior training on the Makino brand. And within a couple of hours, he was able to operate the machine and cut a part," Ey said. "So he was trained by Athena, and using the voice commands to get the machine up and running. He did not know our control before. He was only familiar with a competitive brand control."

Normally, Ey said, machinists go through a three-day operational instruction on the Makino EDM.

He cited another case of a customer where a machine ran out of wire. "We had a secretary go down to the machine and ask Athena how to change a wire. And she did the wire change," Ey said.

Athena is platform neutral. That means it has the potential to become standard across a broad range of industrial machinery, iTSpeeX says on its website.

"Athena was designed to empower and enable human machinists, not to automate them," said Dan Bagley, the chief architect of Athena.

Ey said iTSpeeX developed an Athena toolkit for equipment manufacturers.

"It's like in the old days, marrying a printer to a PC," he said. "You have to have certain drivers inside the PC to activate that printer. Each machine control — whether it be injection molding machine, or a milling machine from Makino or a turning machine from another company — they all have different controls. So, what iTSpeeX developed was a toolkit that allows each machine tool builder to configure the interface on how to control the machine's voice."

Makino links Athena through its Hyper-i control system for EDM machines. The Athena hardware includes a second display screen and the HyperConnect feature that gives full interconnectivity with personal computers or smart devices and remote monitoring, including email alerts. Operators talk to Athena by using a wireless microphone on a Bluetooth headset that comes with the Athena package.

Athena currently can handle about 200 voice commands on the Makino equipment, using common EDM tasks, such as changing control screens, pickup routines, to thread or cut the wire, fill or drain the work tank, detail wire consumption, track how much wire is left on a spool and report alarms and warnings.

Makino is adding features all the time.

"It's more like an industrial assistant. Let's say you are the operator and you want to know how to maintain a machine or change a filter on a machine. You ask Athena to do that; it pulls up the manuals. It pulls up the instructional page, so the operator doesn't have to search for it. It makes it faster," Ey said. "If he's looking how to set up the machine for the next process, it will pull up the process sheets. It has training content in it, so if he wants to learn about certain things, again, he can call it up."

Athena is self-learning over time, based on interactions with users.

Shop owners also can ask Athena for information.

"In the future, you will walk up to the machine and activate Athena based on your voice recognition. Athena will be able to recognize you as a specific user, based on your voice profile. And you can ask what's the spindle utilization or the machine utilization over the last eight hours," Ey said.

Voice activation is a major advancement for machinery.

"The machine tool interface has changed forever," said Brian Pfluger, Makino's EDM product line manager. "There will come a day when we cannot imagine not having the ability to talk to our machines."

Ey said the technology could spread widely beyond the metalworking sector.

"What iTSpeeX's purpose or attention is, they want to get Athena on all industrial equipment, so that no matter what level your operator is, you can walk up to a machine and operate the machine with verbal commands," he said.

Makino also makes fully automated work cells, equipped with tool changers. In Auburn Hills, Makino displays a milling machine combined with a sinker EDM. Lights-out manufacturing is super-efficient, of course, but Ey said the cells also help offset the labor shortage facing the machining sector.

Ey spelled it out: "Imagine if you had the machines without the automation. In order to run the machine, you would need operators first, second and third shift. And it doesn't matter if they're skilled or not. You don't have the labor, in general, that wants to work nights or wants to work weekends.

"So just going down to one guy that can run this five days a week, and you get seven days of 24 hour operations. In the day shift, he runs all the critical parts with the short cycle times. And then he loads it up for the night shift, a second and third shift, with longer lead time items or longer cycle time items."