VOICE
technology
Opinion
Taking a look
at the ‘engine under the bonnet’ of Voice
V
oice is now used daily at thousands of work sites by hundreds of thousands of workers, enabling
them to communicate verbally with the computer systems that manage logistics operations. Wearing a headset and micro - phone, each worker receives ‘spoken’ instructions delivered from a wireless, wearable computer and verbally confirms
warehouse helps customers to more effectively address various business challenges including growth, cost reduction, productivity, throughput, accuracy, traceability and product mix changes. Multiple case studies validate the benefits of Voice across a wide range of industries – with productivity improvements of 20 to 40 per cent, order accuracy improvements to >99.995 per cent, traceability of controlled
using wearable, hands-free, eyes-free solutions.
The proven benefits of using Voice are directly related to the technology employed within the solution and speech recognition technology is the absolutely critical component of any Voice solution for the warehouse. Speech recognition (by humans and computers) would be a relatively easy problem to solve if humans spoke identically and consistently. But we do not. Speech utterances are like snowflakes – no two are exactly the same. Speech recognisers are challenged by factors including subtle differences in how we pronounce words in various situations and by background noise contamination, an issue of particular relevance in fast moving warehouse environments.
Positive results
the completion of tasks back to the system, via a WiFi network. The reasons for the growing worldwide uptake of Voice are easy to see. The Voice-enabled
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MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT October 2010
items and order fulfilment agility. It is also well-documented that mobile workers are more productive and focused – and thereby more accurate – when
All speech recognisers make errors, inserting words not spoken and ignoring or misinterpreting words spoken. The noisy environment of a busy warehouse obviously presents a particularly challenging scenario and the ideal of perfect speech recognition in a warehouse is an impossible one to meet. However, we are continuously moving closer to the ideal with speech recognition technology
Richard Adams:“We are continuously moving closer to the ideal with speech recognition technology…”
that today works extremely effectively in a wide range of noise environments, for a wide range of facility employees, responding ‘instantly’ to operator speech and minimising ‘total cost of use’. We are achieving positive results by focusing on characteristics of work in the warehouse that our technology can use to its advantage, including the use of small, fixed vocabularies made up of short phrases and words that are repeated across a large numbers of transactions.
The technology Vocollect continues to develop for use in the warehouse is ‘speaker- dependent’ – our warehouse speech recogniser is ‘trained’ by each individual user in a 20 minute one-time set up process. This contrasts with the alternative option, a ‘speaker-independent’ or ‘untrained’ speech recogniser. Choosing which option to go with is a hugely important decision for anyone putting Voice into the warehouse. So why does trained speech recognition continue to be the most popular approach? At first glance, untrained speech recognition may seem to have an advantage simply because it doesn’t require the initial investment of user time to
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