User Manual

54
• Task dialog
Overview
Since the Talkman terminal is worn on the waist, operators are free to use their hands to
inspect items, pick products, or repair defects. Operators do not have to use hands or eyes
to read from labels, lists, or an electronic display. There are a few button controls on the
Talkman terminal, but almost all interaction with the terminal is done with the operator's
voice.
Voice prompts from a terminal, heard through the headset, direct operators on what
actions to take. Operators respond to the terminal through the microphone attached to the
headset. A response can answer a question that the terminal has asked, verify information,
request help from the terminal, or ask the terminal to perform a certain action.
If an operator needs help or makes a mistake while using a Talkman terminal, he or she
can pause the terminal, ask the terminal to repeat the last prompt or ask for help, or
erase responses, all by speaking to the terminal.
Talkman terminals can be used in a variety of environments: hot, cold, noisy, humid, and
so on. The Talkman terminal has buttons and an LED indicator light, but not a display
screen (which are often temperature sensitive). As a result, terminals continue to work
well on a noisy loading dock or in a freezer.
Sampling Noise with the Terminal
A Talkman terminal must be able to distinguish an operator's voice from any other noise
that is going on around the operator. In order to differentiate between the operator's voice
and background noise (i.e. all other sounds going on around an operator when he or she is
speaking to a terminal), the terminal takes a sampling of the background noise as well as
the operator's voice. This sample enables the terminal to tell the difference between the
operator's voice and other sounds that may be going on around the operator.
Each time a terminal is turned on, the terminal takes a noise sample. During use, the
terminal also takes noise samples occasionally throughout the day. This helps the terminal
to better understand what an operator is saying, especially in an environment where the
noise level changes frequently.
Training the Talkman Terminal to Recognize an Operator's
Voice
The first time an operator uses a terminal in the Talkman system at your site, the operator
must train the system to understand his or her speech by speaking the vocabulary words
used at the particular site.
Sometimes an operator's terminal might have a hard time understanding a word that the
operator is saying. When this situation occurs, the operator may need to retrain the word.
The operator may have pronounced the word differently during enrollment training from
how he or she pronounces it during everyday speech, and the terminal may have a difficult
time recognizing the word.
Task Dialog
When an operator uses a Talkman terminal, what words the terminal speaks and what
words the operator can say to respond to the terminal depend on something called the
task dialog. The task dialog is the spoken output of a task. In the Talkman system, the task
contains terminal prompts with acceptable operator responses for each prompt. The
terminal uses the task dialog to determine whether or not an operator's response is
allowable and what to do with any given response.