’Hands-Free, Eyes-Free Voice Productivity’: For Many a Hollow Promise

by Bob Bova

For many IT professionals responsible for supporting large mobile workforces at Fortune Class companies, the promise of ‘hands-free, eyes-free voice productivity’ is quite possibly, with few exceptions, the most disappointing mobile and wireless technology in the last decade. Many have either ignored it, been sucker-punched by it, under-whelmed by the actual functionality and often shocked by the investment required to deploy it. Even we have stopped using the ‘hands-free, eyes-free’ moniker. It has become a hollow, throw-away expression to those seriously evaluating productivity solutions.

In the world of voice (or speech recognition) technologies, what does ‘hands-free, eyes-free really mean? Because of excessive hype and poor performance, it means limited and often unreliable voice functionality…yet its declared a productivity solution. It’s like mobile hardware manufactures charging you $2K for a mobile computer with only 2 F-Keys and 10 alphabet keys.

Voice has been credited for what would be consider fairly simplistic mobile functions. Say you’re a director of store operations for 5 retail locations in your district. On your mobile device, you use a voice command to search and call up a sales performance report for your Poughkeepsie location from your back-end database. Boom. There it is. OMG! ‘Scotty you’re a miracle worker! But still you have to stop, look down and read the report. Is voice search ‘technically’ hands-free, eyes-free? I suppose…technically.

Are simple voice functions like ‘go to my documents’ and voice search, real productivity accelerators? If so, we all owe an apology to Motorola Solutions, Intermec, LXE, Psion Teklogix and the other enterprise mobile computer manufacturers. They market powerful mobile devices used for a myriad of complex work directed applications; i.e., warehouse management, mobile inspections, dispatch & delivery, mobile maintenance and repair. These devices are often used by very capable multi-tasking workforces, each worker pivoting from application to application, using the device to guide them through reporting, business process flow, specific work dynamics and truly provide a level of productivity unthinkable even 4 years ago. That’s productivity. Voice search? Not so much.

Now let's raise the ante. If you’re a police officer, 1st responder, electric, a warfighter, what voice capabilities would make you genuinely‘hands-free-eyes free’?

To serve as a legitimate productivity alternative voice technology must mean complete voice collaboration between you and your existing mobile applications. And that means: 1) voice driven navigation for all application and device commands; 2) the ability to collect heavy data needed for mobile complex transactions and reporting, and; 3) it must mean that your mobile computer should be able to talk to you, voice reporting or alerting you with the information you want or need, when and where you need it. And all these capabilities need to be easily adaptable to all mobile workforce applications, not just for warehouse workers, but anyone in the field dependent on industry grade mobile apps.

Now, if Scotty can build you a voice solution that can do that…then genuine voice productivity can follow in the foot-steps of today's mainstream mobile and wireless productivity technologies.