Voice-enablement vendor sees synergies with RFID, distribution
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Beyond meeting customer mandates, many consumer packaged goods manufacturers have seen limited value from their RFID investments. Now Vocollect—in a test bed of sorts involving users of its voice technology solutions—is looking at aural applications paired with RFID tags to unlock more uses and benefits.
The aural rendering of a document combines speech synthesis and "auditory icons." Aural presentation often occurs by converting the document to plain text and feeding this to a screen reader—i.e., technology that simply reads all the characters on the screen.
Larry Sweeney, VP of product management for Vocollect, sees synergies for aural, voice, and RFID solutions. "Voice is good at directing people, while RFID is good at capturing data," he says, adding that together they can lead to warehouse efficiency gains.
Vocollect's wearable, voice-enabled computer prompts warehouse workers for their scheduled tasks and enables data entry via wireless microphones. Now the vendor is experimenting with adding a small RFID reader to the computer. The reader gathers data from RFID tags and passes it back to the computer, which parses it and conveys the information aurally to the worker. In short, the RFID tags "talk."
Sweeney says talking tags could allow a worker to determine on the spot whether a product's sell-by date has passed, or if a particular item has the wrong lot number, while engineer-to-order and custom manufacturers might use talking tags to match the right parts with the right assemblies as they go through the manufacturing line.
While certain technical issues still have to be resolved, concludes Sweeney, "The first good applications in distribution are going to be technologies combined with RFID. We think voice is perfect for this."
