ORDER PICKING WITH VOICE IN WAREHOUSE MANAGEMENT

Order picking with voice is undergoing yet another transformation. Since its pioneering days in the 1990s, voice picking consisted of predominantly proprietary hardware and software solutions, such as those by Vocollect, using mobile computers embedded with speaker-dependent speech engines. Then in the early 2000s, vendors such as Voxware started moving away from proprietary hardware and shifted to more open architecture solutions that they embedded in commercial, off-the-shelf mobile computing devices such as those marketed by Motorola and LXE. This open hardware era saw an increase in speaker independent technologies and the rise in multimodal functionality allowing devices to capture data multiple ways, whether via voice, scanning, or RFID. Both “proprietary solutions” and “open hardware” approaches physically require a mobile computer when picking. But over the past three years, the proliferation of high-performance wireless networks and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone systems has ushered in what could be a new era in voice. Coca-Cola Enterprises, partnering with Cisco (a leading provider of wireless networks) and Datria (a Lockheed Martin spin-off specializing in packaged voice-enabled enterprise mobility applications) helped to innovate this network-based approach. With this approach, there’s significant savings in hardware costs, because a company doesn’t have to buy expensive wearable computers for each of its users. Instead, pickers can use a less expensive wireless phone to call a phone number to connect to warehouse management systems (WMS) and other enterprise systems