Intro
Introduced in the early 2000s, voice application technology took the industrial world by storm — giving a vast range of supply chain workers a hands-free experience in their production line, warehouse, and distribution center. While popular at inception, voice apps, specifically voice-picking tools, are expected to explode in adoption from now and into the future.
For example, what was a market size of $2.3 billion in 2022 is expected to grow to $6.03 billion by 2029. That's a 14.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR)!
Of course, it's no shock as to why so many industrial businesses want to adopt such an innovative concept. The quality control and productivity benefits are invaluable to the supply chain and critical infrastructure, in general, is constantly feeling the pressure to digitally evolve.
Is your company next to invest in these productivity hacks? Here's everything you need to know about adopting voice applications in your network.
Voice Applications Explained: What's All the Hype?
Like commanding Siri to send a text or open an app on your iPhone, voice-picking software lets you perform hands-free tasks through a connected headset. In an operation that requires inventory picking, such as a warehouse, manufacturing plant, distribution center, or retail store, these tools use voice recognition technology to communicate with workers and provide instructions.
For example, imagine how tedious it is to navigate a large warehouse without directions, constantly looking up and down at a tablet or clip board when retrieving a sales order. Sounds brutal.
Now imagine having a helpful guide in your ear telling you exactly where to go and what to pick and then automatically updating the system after selecting and scanning that product. That's voice-picking technology.
Voice apps ultimately boost productivity by letting you work hands-free and pick more products in less time. It's also a much safer way to navigate your facility. The main upside, however, is that it ensures higher picking accuracy, so customers always get what they ordered on time.
Voice App Considerations: Preparing Your Network
Before jumping the gun and just throwing voice apps into your tech stack, consider some of the risks and ramifications:
IT and OT Security
Security within information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) environments is always a factor when adding new network components.
With voice apps, in particular, data transmission interceptions are a significant concern. Through packet sniffing and man-in-the-middle attacks, a threat actor could eavesdrop on the network, listen in on user commands, and extract information such as customer names, addresses, employee PINs, or other personal data.
How to Resolve
Maintain packet visibility on your voice hardware and servers through network test access points (TAPs) so you can spot anomalies and threats in real time.
You should also deploy multi-factor authentication for the voice technology and utilize encryption for all data transmitted between the devices and connected applications.
Finally, ensure employees are trained to securely operate their voice-picking tools and minimize risk by avoiding verbal commands that contain sensitive information.
Network Visibility
For maximum uptime and performance of voice applications, you need systems that can monitor device usage, network traffic, and quality of voice communications so you can quickly make adjustments and upgrades as needed.
Unfortunately, many companies don't loop in their IT or OT management teams to ensure this level of visibility.
How to Resolve
Collaborate with all stakeholders, including your IT director, OT engineers, cybersecurity team, and business users, to have a solid deployment plan in place and the tools to keep tabs on your voice-picking apps.
Implement access controls and monitoring tools, so you always know who's operating your voice apps, get real-time status updates, and quickly troubleshoot quality issues. Network TAPs, for example, can act as brokers to give you network visibility without interfering with its voice app performance.
Network Bandwidth
Voice-picking apps process a lot of day-to-day data that can overload your network if you aren't prepared. From packet loss to latency to jitter, the result can be bad-quality transmissions or other network resources slowing down — impeding your entire operation.
How to Resolve
Conduct initial network assessments to determine bandwidth and whether you can even add new voice apps without impacting the rest of the environment. If it doesn't meet the required standards, you may need to upgrade your switches, routers, and other hardware to support the increased data traffic.
You should also track network performance with visibility tools, such as network TAPS, that provide "listen-only" monitoring without slowing anything else down.
Supplement these actions with Quality of Service (QoS) policies that let you allocate bandwidth specifically to your voice applications. Hence, you always have dependable communications and can maximize your voice app ROI.
Prepare Your Network with Garland Technology
While hands-free picking is the future of streamlined supply chains, many companies may not have the robust network needed to support voice app security and performance requirements.
Looking to seamlessly adopt voice app technology in your warehouse, but not sure where to start? Join us for a brief Design-IT consultation or demo. No obligation - it’s what we love to do!
Glossary
- Voice-picking software: hands-free electronic (app) systems that use voice prompts to direct order fulfillment workers to specific warehouse locations to select the item or items the work needs to complete a customer’s order.
- Packet sniffing: Packet analyzers, also known as packet sniffers or network analyzers, are a network monitoring tool that examines data traffic moving in and out of the network. These tools analyze network performance issues that can lead to traffic bottlenecks, network downtime, and other common performance issues that ultimately effect end-user experience and a companies productivity.
- Man-in-the-middle attack: a type of cyber attack in which the attacker secretly intercepts communications between two parties who believe they are messaging directly with each other - think eavesdropping.
- Multi-factor authentication: a method to ensure login / access to software programs and electronic devices is safe and verifies the person is authorized.
