In an IoT world, you’ll have a connected car. Your connected car has all kinds of sensors to detect when to brake, how your car is performing, etc., and a connected speaker that will communicate with you.  If your car stops suddenly and no brakes were applied, it might mean you got into a crash.  If you have the right app, you might find your car talking to you to see if you are OK. Your talking car will most likely be your vehicle assistance company or an emergency services drone hovering above connected to your car speaker.  All the wearables you have on you will also be measuring and probing your health.  Something might indicate to the right application that you have some kind of problem.  And if you did, you might also hear someone talking to you asking if you need assistance.  Video would be involved as well because cameras will be everywhere. This is an example of a more complicated instance. But IoT will be used in very simple functions as well.

If a sensor picked up some anomaly, such as low water pressure, or high isolated temperature, someone could look at a camera first to see if there is an actual issue.  This would all save time and expenses. These are some examples I can think of for the marriage of IoT and voice communications, but I’m sure there are literally thousands, if not hundreds of thousands more use cases involving voice and video.

These examples show that the communications industry can and will play in the IoT market with the marriage of real time communications and IoT.  It will just be different than what built all of our companies today. The main app will not be person-to-person communication like we are used to.  The value of IoT to our companies is tremendous, and because of IoT, the voice/video/messaging part we know well will be a part of a larger application story. 

This is a 3-part blog series on real-time communications and IoT. Click below to read part 1 and part 2.

Part 1: Relationship between IoT and RTC

Part 2: M2M= Wingman to IoT and RTC