by F. Robert Jacobs, Ph.D.
Oct 18, 2018
ShippingEasy is an innovative company that offers software for managing many common supply chain tasks. The software features logic that ties users into the best commercial shipping rates offered by the U.S. Postal Service, United Parcel Service, and FedEx. As orders arrive in shopping carts, platforms, and marketplaces the software automatically plans inventory picking and shipments to efficiently process the order.

ShippingEasy has developed a “skill” for Alexa the cloud-based voice service run by Amazon. Using the voice-driven capability, orders and shipments can be managed with simple voice commands. The simple conversational user interface speeds the training of workers and improves overall productivity.

The Alexa/ShippingEasy collaboration is a great example of how technologies from different companies can be integrated to create more capable systems. In this case the Alexa speech recognition technology is programmed to automatically generate commands for the ShippingEasy e-commerce software, thus replacing the tedious computer input user interface. These types of integrated technologies will be a key feature of the intelligent systems of the future.