Open standards add flexibility to voice systems

By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 6/1/2007

Open standards, rather than proprietary systems, drive the adoption of technology, according to Charles Rafferty, vice president and general manager of North American operations for Voxware.

That explains why Voxware made the decision more than a year ago to get out of the voice hardware business and concentrate on delivering a scalable voice software platform based on open standards like Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Java, voiceXML and Web technology.

“Open systems give end users a choice,” Rafferty told Modern at RedShift, RedPrairie's annual user conference. “They can choose from a variety of hardware providers that best suit their needs and put voice in many different places.”

Voxware was at RedShift to announce the strategic integration of its voice platform with RedPrairie's warehouse management system (WMS). The pair also joined LXE in a demonstration of ARIA, LXE's suite of mobile computing applications that integrate mobile computing, WMS, voice and other automatic identification and data collection (AIDC) technologies.

Partnerships like those with RedPrairie and LXE represent Voxware's strategy for the future: Where the company once sold its own line of voice-enabled hardware, it now will focus on working with other solution providers to deliver more benefit.

“A few years ago, we offered a proprietary voice unit with a few buttons and no screen,” Rafferty explained. “That was fine for just voice, but the reality is that it's a multi-modal world. Our customers want to use voice and bar codes and RFID. We cannot out engineer a company like LXE. It makes more sense, and is more valuable for the customer, to let them deploy and support the hardware.”

In addition to more hardware choices, voice is now more adaptable to more processes within a DC or across an enterprise. “We have had customers up and running on voice in three to four weeks,” Rafferty said. “We also recently worked with a customer that has 19 different WMS systems. In the past, adapting to all of those systems would have been a problem. Now, with open systems, it's not an issue.”