How dawin speechSort helps to sort mail

SORTING BY VOICE

In companies where a high volume of mail is received, the sorting of postal items is usually fully automated. Smaller volumes or letters that cannot be sorted by machine must be manually sorted afterwards.

Sorting these letters afterwards can take a lot of time, especially if the names and addresses are hard to read or incomplete, since the sorter will often have to search through long employee and duty lists. These lists usually come in the form of paper documents or as files on a PC. Paper lists must be paged through or the search criteria must be entered into a computer. Both of these keep the sorter at his or her desk and increase the amount of time needed. dawin has developed, in cooperation with a French company, OUTILS OCÉANS, a speech-assisted sorting solution that does away with this shortcoming: the sorter can stand in front of the sorting boxes, give the sort criteria as voice commands, and be told by way of an audio response the right pigeonhole to use.

The programme facilitates speech-supported use of EXCEL with client-specific sorting criteria such as name, post code, contract number, etc. and allocates mail to the correct pigeonhole (employee name, department, etc.) If a criterion is unclear (e.g. name is not legible), then a more detailed query can be carried out with additional criteria. Entries in EXCEL as well as the audio response associated with each one and the speech recognition feature can be customised and optimised for each individual client at any time without additional programming. This allows clients to make changes to sorting criteria or classifications themselves, for example.

dawin uses language technology by the market leader, Nuance, for speech recognition and audio output. This means that the user does not have to read out a text aloud beforehand to familiarise the system with the user’s voice.
In France, OUTILS OCÉANS distributes the speech-assisted mail sorting solution under the name of FACILITRI. In Germany and in the rest of the world, the product by dawin is marketed under the name speechSort by dawin.

You can read the full report on Facilitri and Outils Océans here.