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Voice Control: Talk to your Resco apps

kid shouting into a microphone
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What was once considered sci-fi is now becoming a standard feature.
All of us understand the convenience of simply telling Alexa or Siri to turn on the lights, start the air conditioning, or increase the volume when your favorite song comes up. But over the last couple of years, voice recognition and voice-controlled software has matured to become highly sought-after even across the enterprise sector – saving time, increasing productivity and enabling even greater mobility.
How?
Well, for a vast majority of people talking will always be faster than writing. In fact, dictating is approximately three times faster than typing.
Using your voice to fill out forms or dictate your notes gives you more time to focus on other aspects of work – therefore, you can visit more clients, process more orders, or complete more repairs.
And you can do it all on the go, with your hands free to take on other activities at the same time. Just imagine a service tech asking his tablet to look up the blueprint of a diesel generator while he opens the service hatch.
That’s why we decided to incorporate Voice Control into Resco’s mobile applications as well. So users of Resco Mobile CRM, Inspections and Routes can be even more productive in the field.

Requirements

Voice Control works in the latest versions of all Resco mobile applications for Android. At the moment, it  supports only the English language.
The feature has to be turned on in the Appearance section of Setup in your app.
At the same time, Voice Control and Text-to-Speech features must be enabled and set to English in the Android system settings.

How to control Resco apps with your voice

To activate Voice Control, the user must open the application and say the word “Resco” (reskəʊ; reskoʊ). The app will beep and display a toast line saying “Listening…” at the bottom of the screen. The user then has several seconds to say a command.
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A dotted grey line indicates the item that the app is focused on at the moment. In the toast line, the app will also indicate whether it has understood the voice command or not.
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Users can navigate in their app by saying “Go Back”, “Go Next”, “Read More”, “Read Focus”, “Find”, “Open”, “Close Form”.
By saying “Read Commands”, the user gets an overview of commands available for the form or list.
Saying “Start ” executes a command available on the form or list(E.g. “Start Run Report” to generate a mobile report from an Order form) and “Input ” fills in the currently focused field (e.g. “Input 4,999”, when you want to fill in the Price field on a Product form).
System admins can also change the action words for voice commands in Woodford – to do so, just open the mobile project and choose Voice Control in the menu on the left.
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Action words overview

Below you can find the complete list of standard action words for Voice Control – what they do, how they make the app behave:
Open
Opens currently focused item – this applies for all views and Home Form.
Find
Find a record by name – search through the list of views for the specified text.
Go Back
Set focus to previous item – moves the focus to the previous item on a list or the previous field on a form.
Go Next
Set focus to next item – moves the focus to the next item on a list or the next field on a form.
Close Form
Closes the current form.
Read Focus
Reads out the currently focused item.
Read More
Starts reading items in their natural direction. It starts from the next item (following the one currently in focus). It can be interrupted by saying “Stop” – The app will stop reading and it will change the focus to the last item that has been read completely.
Read Commands
Reads out all commands available on the current form or list. Can be interrupted by saying “Stop”.
Start
Executes one of the commands which are available on a list or form.
Input
Sets specified value to the currently focused field.
Date – “yesterday”, “today”, “tomorrow”, “now”
Time – “midnight”, “morning”, “noon”, “afternoon”, “evening”, “night”, “now”,
Hours – numbers (+ am/pm/o’clock/-); negative numbers and numbers bigger than 24 are ignored; 24 equals 0
Multiselect – the user says one option, it works even when he/she says only the beginning of the option text that is not identical to other options.
Help
Reads out all available commands – can be executed anywhere in your app.

And there’s more to come

Voice Control has been introduced in our Summer Update 2019 and will be further expanded in upcoming releases as well.
To try Voice Control on your Android device you can download Resco Mobile CRM, Inspections, or Routes from Google Play and download the latest version of Woodford here.

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