Voice Recognition Devices

Voice recognition or speech recognition devices is the translation of spoken words into text. It is also known as “Automatic Speech Recognition”, “Speech to Text” or “STT”. Voice recognition programs do not actually understand speech; they only recognize a vocabulary of pre-programmed words.

Voice recognition is commonly used to operate a device, perform commands, or write without having to operate a keyboard, mouse, or press any buttons. They are often used to also detect from the wave lengths that a specific voice is speaking the words, like the driver of the car.

The term voice recognition refers to finding the identity of “who” is speaking, rather than what they are saying. It can be used to authenticate or verify the identity of a speaker as part of a security process.

Mobile devices are seen as ideal platform for using voice recognition- mainly because, when you’re using your smart phone, you can use your hands to do other things. Although smart phone processor power has advanced significantly, voice recognition still requires a great deal of heavy lifting and therefore Apple has chosen to use cloud technologies to offload to servers to do most of the processing.

The US military and several aerospace companies are researching the use of speech recognition to control an aircraft. In theory, this will be faster than using a joystick or wheel.

Types of Voice Recognition Systems

Speaker Dependent System - The voice recognition must be trained before it can be used. This often requires a user, who reads a series of words and phrases so the computer can understand the user’s voice.

Speaker Independent System – The voice recognition software recognizes most users’ voices with no training.

Discrete Speech Recognition – The user must pause between each word so that the speech recognition can identify each separate word.

Continuous Speech Recognition – The voice recognition can understand a normal rate of speaking.

Natural Language – The speech recognition not only can understand the voice but also return answers to questions or other queries that are being asked.

Benefits

Reduce Costs and Improve Efficiency

When voice technology is used for order picking procedures for example, there is no need to print paper picking lists because these lists are verbally communicated to the worker. Voice applications have proven to greatly reduce supply and labor costs by saving paper and reducing steps in various procedures.

Improves Warehouse Safety

When works are using voice technology there are not required to spend nearly as much time looking at and handling mobile devices. The “hands free and eyes free” operation provided by voice applications leads to less waste paper or label backing sheets, resulting in a cleaner and safer ware house.

Reduce training Procedures

New warehouse order pickers have found that voice directed tasks that are easier to learn and follow than interpreting a paper task. Training time is significantly reduced, and workers are able to adapt to new tasks quicker providing additional cost savings and ROI for voice technology.

Receive Fast ROI

Voice technology provides a realistic and fast ROI. When speech recognition is used for order picking for example, companies operating more than one picking shift will spread the cost out across all shifts and see a ROI of less than 6 months on average. Companies operating a single picking shift will see an ROI of approximately 1 year.

When speech recognition is implemented properly companies will obtain a valuable ROI from their voice recognition technology solution.

Disadvantages

• Error rate is considerably high.
• Recognition of words is slow.
• Words sounding similar cannot be differentiated.
• The system is not suitable for use in noisy places.
• The software must be trained to recognize technical words.
• Many people find it difficult to speak in a ‘writing’ style.

Because of their limitations and high cost, voice recognition systems have traditionally been used only in a few specialized situations. For example, such systems are useful in instances when the user is unable to use a key board to enter data because his or her hands are occupied or disables. Instead of typing commands, the user can simply speak into a headset. Increasingly, however, as the cost decreases and performance improves, speech recognition systems are entering the mainstream and are being used as an alternative to keyboards.

Voice recognition or voice activated applications have become buzzing concept in recent years. The idea that a person is able to speak into a microphone attached to a computing device and those words typed out used to be the stuff of science fiction and part of “Iron Man”, is now REALITY.