There's paint drying and then there's listening to elevators talk, both calming and now both available online.It's a way for the company to show customers exactly what its Internet-connected elevators are doing.
"Our marketing people wondered if anyone had ever seen how machines really talk. So we decided to show it," said Kone president and CEO Henrik Ehrnrooth.The real-time page shows four elevators communicating with Kone's cloud-based network that feeds into IBM's Watson platform. There's also an audio function that allows visitors to listen to the conversation.
The messages are translated into English from machine data, Ehrnrooth said.
So what exactly does that look like?
On Friday at 11:35 am, the elevator in Illinois told Kone's main computer that it was experiencing "minimal sway while starting my way down."
The Kone network replied, "Negligible sway. Keep going."
A minute later the elevator reported, "Slight vibration on my way down," to which the Kone network
The translation for its eavesdropping public: "Patience is a virtue. Somebody will ride soon," the elevator replied.
Kone wants users to know that there's no worry about anyone hacking into its elevators as the data flow is only outward. "You can't send information to them," the CEO said.
The company has about 1,000 of these cloud-connected elevators around the world. They're especially popular in China, which is a growing market for the company.
"We're thinking of adding an elevator in China to the page because right now when it's night in Europe and in the United States it's a bit boring. With China, there would always be elevators that were being used," Ehrenrooth said.
This report by me (suraj)
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