Nuance Prevails in Warehouse Test
Computer Task Group (CTG), a provider of IT and warehouse automation services, announced yesterday that it has selected speech technology from Nuance Communications to power Vulcan Voice, its new speech-enabled solution for logistics operations.
Vulcan Voice incorporates Nuance's VoCon 3200 speech recognition and embedded text-to-speech applications on wireless handheld devices running on the Windows Mobile or Windows CE platforms. With Vulcan Voice, the central warehouse management system (WMS) dictates work assignments in the areas of inventory picking, receiving, cycle counting, and inspections to warehouse employees. The employees enter product data into front-office systems and confirm completed tasks back to the WMS with their voices.
Voice-directed systems like these have typically improved worker productivity and accuracy across manufacturing plants and distribution facilities by freeing workers' hands and eyes to focus on specific warehouse tasks. Some facilities that have incorporated similar systems have reported greater than 99 percent accuracy in picking and order selection.
"We selected Nuance as our strategic partner based on the high recognition accuracy demonstrated by the VoCon 3200 engine, especially in noisy environments, such as those a mobile device user might experience in a distribution center," said Michael Colson, CTG's senior vice president, IT Solutions. "In our logistics laboratories, engineers evaluated several competitive voice technologies by conducting extensive noise and accuracy tests and concluded that Nuance VoCon 3200 was the clear choice for embedded voice-recognition. Nuance also provides state-of-the-art embedded text-to-speech software that accurately reads data in a natural-sounding voice."
Another key reason for selecting Nuance was the vocabulary detection that the speech technology provider enables. Operator voice-training is not required using Vulcan Voice because the VoCon 3200 engine compares spoken phrases against dynamically-generated phonetic variations of the vocabulary. This saves CTG customers valuable time when bringing new employees up to speed.
And because VoCon 3200 is adaptable to virtually any voice-enabled Windows device, warehouse operators do not have to purchase dedicated headsets and mobile computers, allowing them instead to leverage existing mobile technology. It is also speaker-independent, meaning that workers can share equipment.
Vulcan Voice can accommodate speakers in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Japanese, and Chinese. These languages can be easily switched out to accommodate multiple operators who speak different languages.
The selection by CTG is Nuance's latest entry into the warehousing space. The company already has deals in place with Vocollect, Voxware, Cadre, LXE, Lucas Systems and a few other warehouse speech automation vendors.
"We're excited to see more movement in this space," says Robert Rieger, account manager for embedded speech solutions at Nuance. "Warehousing is where we have seen some of the highest return on investment. The next generation of speech recognition will be in this market."
Warehouses, Rieger says, are a good test of speech recognition because of the noise levels, many and varied accents used by workers, unique user interfaces, and hardware limitations that such an environment presents. "As people see an ROI in certain pieces of the chain, the market will grow," he predicts.