Nowadays, industrial companies want to enhance their Industry 4.0 competencies. Therefore, they need to help employees master state-of-the-art technologies and gain the necessary knowledge to stay relevant and competitive. As a result, there is a global demand for learning and training tools that assist the employees at all levels. In this paper, we propose a natural language-enabled virtual assistant (VA) integrated with an industrial mobile manipulator to fulfill this target in manufacturing tasks. The latest Learning, Training, Assistance - Formats, Issues, Tools (LTA-FIT) model is leveraged to guide the design and development of a pilot version of the VA. To validate its performance, three manufacturing scenarios are analyzed based on the learning, training, and assistance phases, respectively. In our system, the human-robot interaction is achieved through conversation and a dashboard implemented as a web application. This intuitive interaction enables operators of all levels to control a industrial mobile manipulator easier and use it as a complementary tool for developing their competencies. The pilot experiments show that the proposed VA is able to respond to operator commands flexibly within the LTA-FIT model.
