A Railroad Finds Its Voice

Computerworld - Any casual shipper can tap into a FedEx or UPS Web site and determine the location of even the smallest of packages. But until recently, The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway Co. (BNSF) tracked its trains the old-fashioned way, through two-way voice radios located in every locomotive cab.
Train crews dropped off cars and then radioed that information back to a dispatcher at BNSF's high-tech network operations center at the railroad's headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. The dispatchers would then have to type these reports into DB2 databases running on IBM mainframe computers.
Though BNSF could communicate with train crews over engine-cab radios hooked into a private microwave system that spanned 14,000 miles in 27 states, the system provided "static information," according to John Hicks, BNSF's director of unified messaging. Crews would start their day with written work orders and turn them in at the end of the day -- with periodic calls to report cars dropped off or picked up. Jeff Campbell, BNSF's CIO, viewed this approach as outdated, cumbersome and incapable of meeting the demands of customers and railroad management for near-real-time data. Last year, BNSF launched a project to automatically turn those voice radio calls into data capable of integration into the company's computer systems.
Campbell says BNSF decided to use its voice radios as the interface to an interactive voice response system and tapped ScanSoft Inc. in Peabody, Mass., to provide it with speech-recognition software. ScanSoft had never integrated IVR with a radio system before, and the company found it a challenge, said Rob Kassel, ScanSoft's senior product manager for network speech.
That's because two-way radio systems have lower fidelity than the phone lines traditionally used with IVR. The fidelity problem was compounded by the noisy environment of a locomotive cab, Kassel adds. ScanSoft built the BNSF IVR application on its SpeechWorks software and added noise filters. ScanSoft also sampled engineer radio calls to teach the software to recognize speech generated in such a noisy environment.
Although this is an unusual application of an IVR, Dan Miller, an analyst at Zelos Group Inc. in San Francisco, says radio-to-data interfaces are the next frontier for IVR systems. There's a "huge growth potential" within many industries, including trucking, utilities and field service fleet firms, he says.
Once ScanSoft completed its work, Campbell says, BNSF integrated the SpeechWorks software with an IVR platform from Intervoice Inc. in Dallas and a digital radio interface from Telex Communications Inc. in Burnsville, Minn. Beth Bonjour, assistant vice president of technology at