Watch A GE Engineer Chat With A Robotic Power Plant

We are entering the era of talking machines--and it's about more than just asking Amazon's Alexa to turn down the music. General Electric has built a digital assistant into its cloud service for managing power plants, jet engines, locomotives, and the other heavy equipment it builds. Over the internet, an engineer can ask a machine--even one hundreds of miles away--how it's doing and what it needs. Fast Company got an exclusive demonstration of the technology before its debut at GE's Minds Machines conference in San Francisco. Voice controls are built on top of GE's Digital Twin program, which uses sensor readings from machinery to create virtual models in cyberspace.