by Serguey Shinder
In 2025 we moved picking in our largest warehouse from handheld scanners to headsets. The picker hears where to go and what to take, and confirms each pick by saying the code on the shelf. It freed both hands and raised picks per hour by about a sixth in the first quarter. It also exposed something about our product codes that nobody had needed to know in twenty years.
Our codes were designed for screens and labels. Two letters and four digits, chosen when a printed catalogue was our main channel. They are perfectly readable. A surprising number of them are not sayable. BD4410 and BE4410 sound almost identical through a headset in a noisy aisle. So do M and N, F and S, fifteen and fifty. In the first month roughly one voice confirmation in every three hundred matched the wrong shelf, and we traced most of them to about ninety pairs of codes that differ only in letters that sound alike.
We fixed the warehouse the way voice picking systems usually do. Each shelf now carries a separate two digit check number, assigned so that neighbouring locations never share one, and pickers say that instead. It works. What held my attention was that the problem was not really in the warehouse.
Our customer service line was hearing the same confusion that year, from customers reading codes to an agent over the phone. Our sales team had begun dictating order notes into their phones. A trade customer asked whether the voice assistant in his van could reorder from us. Every one of those is a person saying one of our identifiers aloud to a machine, or to somebody who cannot see what they are looking at.
My expectation for the next decade is that speaking becomes an ordinary way into most of the systems we build, alongside typing rather than instead of it, in vehicles, on building sites, in aisles, anywhere hands are occupied. Almost every identifier our industry has designed was designed to be read, and the ones that cope with being spoken will be the ones somebody chose with that in mind.
New codes we issue now avoid the letter pairs most easily confused aloud, and carry a check character, so that a misheard code fails instead of quietly matching a real product that happens to sound similar. The old codes stay, because too much outside the company depends on them. And before any new scheme of identifiers goes live, somebody reads a list of them down a poor phone line while somebody at the other end writes down what they heard.
For twenty years we checked our codes by looking at them, and they passed every time. None of us had ever thought to listen to them.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply