CTG Delivers Vulcan Voice Technology

When a leading global snack food manufacturer came to CTG more than a decade ago for custom-designed warehouse management software (WMS), picking and placing inventory was routinely accomplished using paper documents and barcode scanning readers.  Operators spent their days picking and placing inventory following each line item on the paper document while scanning UPC codes with the barcode reader.  Each case or line item, had to be scanned, verified and placed onto the pickbelt or placed in a tote by an operator carrying a piece of paper in one hand and a barcode scanner in the other.

As the cost to move product continued to increase, the manufacturer began to analyze worker productivity metrics in search of better and more cost-effective ways to move and track inventory.  It quickly became clear that allowing the operators to work with both hands and eyes free by using an industrial voice picking system would increase operator productivity and accuracy and deliver a speedy ROI.  Recently, after reviewing and rejecting all of the available systems on the market, CTG was tasked to design and implement a voice-guided picking and placing system using commercial off-the-shelf equipment.  CTG was up to the challenge.

When CTG set out to design and build its Vulcan Voice logistics speech system for Windows, PPC and Windows CE, its engineers evaluated several competitive voice technologies by conducting exhaustive noise and accuracy tests and concluded that speech engines alone are not sufficient for the type of accuracy, flexability and scalability required to voice-enable the warehouse.  Additional value-add algorithms to compensate for impulse and abient noise conditions, variable audio input characteristics of various mobile devices and conversational filtering are necessary for a robust voice solution.

Facilities generally have a substantial investment in mobile terminals and managers are becoming ever more reluctant to purchase additional proprietary wearable computers with the sole function of adding voice-recognition and text-to-speech to their toolbox. Vulcan Voice operates on virtually any mobile computer and does not require taking noise samples to achieve 99% and higher voice recognition accuracy regardless of environment.

Operator voice-training is not required using Vulcan Voice because the Vulcan Voice recognition system compares spoken phrases against dynamically-generated phonetic variations of the vocabulary.  This saves CTG customers valuable time when bringing new employees up to speed.  Further, operators can share equipment instead of being dedicated to a mobile computer or headset.  Building upon an infrasructure capable of reproducing voice responses with high fidelity, even in noisy conditions, allowed CTG to deliver a robust, speaker-independent voice solution. 

In April 2007, CTG delivered Vulcan Voice to the snack food manufacturer and embarked on a 200 warehouse deployment of voice technology throughout North America.

Because today’s market is truly global, voice-recognition systems must support numerous languages. Vulcan Voice can be implemented in several languages including: English, Spanish, Canadian French, Brazilian Portuguese, European French, UK English, Italian, Dutch, European Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. These languages can be easily changed to accommodate multiple operators who speak different languages.

CTG continues to add voice to warehouses all over the world.  Newer warehouse management systems are being designed with a multi-modal approach to take advantage of all of the peripherals available to a mobile computer.  Combinations of technologies, as when integrating bar code scanning with RFID and Vulcan Voice, are proving to be exciting new ways to increase ROI.  CTG will continue to deliver the highest quality Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech-recognition (ASR) systems adapted to the logistics industry in Warehouse Management (WMS), Transportation (TMS), Manufacturing (MES) and beyond.