At FINN, we’re in to make the future of autonomous payments and IoT applications relevant. An exciting additional feature for our service, is enabling autonomous payment through voice - by integrating with Google Voice Assistant. In this blog, our Software Developer Lokesh walks you through all steps needed to trigger autonomous payments by instructing the voice assistant. Let’s dive right in!
To illustrate how things work we came up with a use case. It’s concerning a smart vending machine at our office, connected to the office network and capable of receiving beverage disposal requests through voice. The vending machine disposes both hot (coffee, tea, milk) and cold beverages (Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Fanta).
Employees request their drinks through manual buttons. The vending machine dispenses the requested beverage and triggers the payment with FINN. Our goal: to enable the vending machine to receive the beverage request through voice.
The vending machine should dispense the requested drink, trigger the payment and send a push notification to the mobile app that is registered as owner of the machine. The push notification confirms the beverage was ordered successfully, and payment will be done automatically. Great improvement of the experience of the customer!
We can also pair the vending machine with our software by remotely accessing their respective QR-codes, using the mobile app. After that, we can configure the vending machine to trigger payments through instruction by voice. There are 3 options the Google assistant provides to achieve our goal:
Employees request their drinks through manual buttons. The vending machine dispenses the requested beverage and triggers the payment with FINN. Our goal: to enable the vending machine to receive the beverage request through voice.
We selected web-hook to have our very own web-service running within the office network. Also, we select the fulfilment option for Dialog flow as web-hook, providing our web service URL to post the voice instruction details. The web-service is planned to be running on edge gateway to route the voice instruction to the proper smart IoT device within our local network.
So, the smart IoT device is installed and configured by our SDK - to be able to communicate with FINN’s services. The edge gateway device processes the received request on provided URL end point and triggers the autonomous payment request to FINN. After receiving a response, the gateway process builds the response string and sends back the response to Google Assistant. Finally, the edge gateway requests the IoT smart device to trigger a push notification being send to the registered user’s mobile FINN app.
Still unclear? Have a look at the picture below, illustrating the solution’s workflow:
List of needed entities
To bring the above described solution in action, you need multiple entities:
Also, define required push notifications for vending machines in the Maker Portal - and make note of their Ids. Just like we’ve done for payment actions in previous step.
Want to know how this works in-depth? Our Lokesh made an extensive instruction manual that will guide you through it.
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