New Wiliot chatbot allows companies to ‘talk’ to products

Ambient Internet of Things pioneer Wiliot has launched WiliBot, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that enables natural-language conversations with IoT-connected products.

Companies can use Wilibot to ask questions of their products and supply chains, gleaning information about shelf life, transport, inventory and sustainability, according to a news release.

“Ambient IoT and generative AI are increasingly symbiotic technologies,” Wiliot CEO Tal Tamir said in a news release. “Ambient IoT generates vast amounts of data about trillions of everyday things, and GenAI can uniquely make sense of all that data. On the flipside, GenAI learns by analyzing vast amounts of data. To a real extent, that data has so far been finite, but ambient IoT presents massive new physical world datasets that a GenAI platform like WiliBot — and others — can use to describe products, materials, supply chains, and everything connected to the internet.”

Wiliot’s Ambient Data Platform uses stamp-sized, self-powered IoT Pixels affixed to products and packaging, such as a crate of tomatoes. Via Bluetooth, the pixels communicate information including location, temperature, humidity and carbon footprint to the Wiliot cloud, where businesses analyze the data.

WiliBot connects Wiliot’s pixels to a Large Language Model, which facilitates general-purpose language generation and other natural language processing tasks. Wiliot-developed AI and machine-learning algorithms can then identify supply chain issues, such as shipments of produce handled at unsafe temperatures, and automatically generate responses that allow business to react.

“Although Wiliot’s work in generative AI is relatively recent, the company has long been a pioneer in artificial intelligence and machine learning for deriving insights into ambient IoT data,” Tamir said. “As more companies have begun rolling out Wiliot’s Ambient Data Platform, we’ve been asked how GenAI capabilities might make the transformation even easier. Our answer is WiliBot, the real-world combination of ambient IoT and AI.”

Key Wiliot enterprise customers have begun piloting WiliBot, with a broader rollout scheduled for late 2024 into 2025, according to the release. The company eventually plans to make the technology available to consumers in store and at home through mobile apps.

Wiliot will demonstrate WiliBot and its Ambient Data Platform at MWC Las Vegas 2024, to be held Oct. 8-10.

“Wiliot’s Ambient Data Platform already allows companies to gain unprecedented intelligence about trillions of products,” Tamir said. “Now more businesses — and, in the future, consumers — will be able to ask about and easily understand everything about those products.

“With WiliBot, we’re answering the question, ‘What if your products could talk?’ Now they can, in natural language, thanks to WiliBot.”