VOICE LOGGING FOR FIBRE FIELD WORK
FieldWake
A technician in a fibre vault logs a fault by holding a button and saying one sentence. The phone reads it back, writes it to the work order, and keeps the record until the signal returns.
The turning point
The fault gets logged where it is found, in gloves, with no signal.
I worked with FieldWake's founding team as product design lead, from the brief to the working prototype.
A technician finds a fault at 9:41 with both hands in a cabinet, in gloves, often below street level with no signal. Typing it means stopping the work, so it gets typed at 4:30 from memory, after six more jobs. A fluent transcript can still carry the wrong identifier.
No signal
The fault is found in a vault
A technician finds the fault with both hands in a cabinet, often below street level.
Work order note
Typing means stopping
Typing the fault means stopping the work, in gloves.
Found
Typed
Logged six jobs later
So the fault gets typed at 4:30 from memory, after six more jobs.
Transcript
Fault on terminal 14
Fault on terminal 12
Fluent, and wrong
A fluent transcript can still carry the wrong identifier: the technician said Terminal 14.
The product
Log a fault without taking your gloves off.
Hold the microphone and say the fault. The phone reads back what it heard and waits for a confirm before it writes. Switch to the vault floor to see what happens with no signal.
Admin and information gathering took 30% of working hours in a 2025 Salesforce survey of 350 US technicians and tradespeople, slightly more than the 28% spent on the service itself.
Say the fault in one sentence.
Today
This week
Hold the mic, or press Play to watch one entry.
| Time | Entry | Source | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9:41 | Draft, not saved | Voice | SavedSaved on phoneSynced |
| 9:12 | Access · Vault entered | Check-in | Synced |
| 8:54 | Arrival · WO-2841 | GPS | Synced |
| 8:30 | Assignment · WO-2841 accepted | Dispatch | Synced |
Hold the mic and say one sentence.
My role
I led FieldWake from the brief to the working prototype.
My responsibility
I decided what a technician says, what the phone reads back, how a wrong value is corrected, and when a record counts as delivered.
I worked with the founding team on the brief, the phone and dispatch views and the working prototype.
Readback
Terminal 12Terminal 14
Correction kept the record intact.
Received by dispatchAcknowledged
How I worked
Rewrote the brief around the conditions. Voice-first, hands-free and built to work without signal, because faults are found in vaults and handholes, in gloves.
Kept the voice surface to three commands. Three trigger phrases and no chat interface, so a technician never holds a conversation to log a fault.
Set the evaluation criteria before any result. Capture at the source, the correct asset, correction without restarting, and delivery without duplication.
Dispatch
The record lands even when the work order disagrees.
FE-0917 reaches dispatch marked Needs attention. The technician said Terminal 14; WO-2841 still says Terminal 12, so the work-order update is blocked. The report itself is retained, and the dispatcher settles the mapping with the original recording in front of them.
Decision
Acknowledging receipt and correcting the mapping are two separate acts.
Cost
A dispatcher can acknowledge a report without resolving it, so a fault can sit acknowledged and still open. The queue counts that state on its own rather than folding it into Done.
When the signal drops
Save on the phone first, every time, even with full signal.
FieldWake captures, confirms and saves the record on the phone first. When connectivity returns, the record syncs on its own and becomes visible to dispatch.
How a fault reaches dispatch
- On the phoneCaptureThe technician speaks the fault.
- ConfirmReview the details before saving.
- Saved locallyThe record is stored on the phone.FE-0917 at 9:41
- Waits on the phone while offline.
- SyncUploadingUploads when a connection returns.
- Work systemReceived by work systemVisible in the dispatcher's work log.FE-0917 at 9:47
Design basis: recognition, read-back and the save run on the phone; connectivity only decides when dispatch sees the record. Salesforce keeps speech-to-text on the technician's device for the same reason.
Cost
The phone and the server can each hold a copy of a record. Retries preserve the same record ID, so reconnecting cannot create duplicate entries.
Voice commands
Three words are all it listens for.
Capture starts deliberately and ends on release. The technician can always tell when the microphone is active.
- Find
- Log
- Help
Decisions made
The calls that shaped the build.
Hold to talk instead of a wake word.
A held button opens the microphone for one sentence and closes it on release. The phone is not listening between sentences, and there is no wake word to misfire.
Apple built its Push to Talk framework for walkie-talkie style apps and describes it as privacy-focused.
The technician needs one hand free for the length of a sentence.
Read back before writing.
The phone reads back what it heard and marks where each value came from: said, from the work order, or a work order default. A misheard terminal number is caught before it reaches the work order.
A 2024 study of spoken digits on financial calls measured a 5.8% error rate for Whisper and caught a general-purpose model hearing "twelve six" as "well fix". A fluent transcript can still carry the wrong identifier.
Every log takes a few seconds longer than a blind write.
Only the upload waits for signal.
Vaults have no signal. Speech recognition, the read-back and the save all run on the phone, so the record exists the moment the technician confirms it.
Oxmaint's offline maintenance guide lists cable vaults and below-grade pump rooms as zero-signal zones, built from concrete and steel that block cellular signal.
The dispatcher sees the row minutes after the technician does, and the status has to say so.
The precedent
Borrow the verification loop from voice picking.
Three established practices, adapted for a technician whose eyes are on the fault.
| Established practice | What FieldWake adopted | What the field changed |
|---|---|---|
| Voice picking: the picker says a check digit at each location and the system confirms it. | "No optical signal. Feeder 3, terminal fourteen. Confirm?" A verification step for consequential numbers. | The phone reads the terminal and asset back aloud, because a vault is loud and the technician's eyes are elsewhere. |
| Voice-to-form: fields fill as the technician talks, and the text can be edited before it is processed (Salesforce reports 85% field-level accuracy). | LocationFDH-04 / Terminal 14heard Structured fields with a visible source for each value. | Fields wait until the sentence ends. Listening gets the whole card. |
| Copilot work order updates: suggestions apply only after the technician confirms (Dynamics 365). | Nothing writes without a confirm. | Confirm is one tap, reachable with a gloved thumb. |
- FE-0917No signal
Hold to talk. Release to stop.
9:41
Saved in the vault.
Logged where the fault was found, not typed at 4:30 from memory.
- Read backFE-0917
- Asset
- Fault
- Damaged dropsaid
- Work
- Respliced, retestedsaid
9:41
Corrected in one tap.
The phone read back Terminal 12. One tap made it 14 and kept every other field.
- Work logNo signal
FDH-04 / Terminal 14
FE-0917, damaged drop, respliced
Queued on the phone
Waits on the phone while offline.
9:47
Delivered once.
The confirmed entry reached the work system a single time, when signal returned.
Evaluation approach
What the evaluation needs to establish.
The evaluation pairs capture speed with record accuracy, then follows each confirmed entry through to the work system. A faster interaction earns its place when the technician can correct it easily and trust that the record arrives.
- 01Capture at the source. The fault is logged where it is found. In the composite scenario, that is 9:41 in the vault rather than 4:30 from memory.
- 02Save the correct asset. The record names Terminal 14, not the Terminal 12 the phone first heard.
- 03Correct without restarting. A wrong value is repaired in place, and the other fields stay as spoken.
- 04Deliver without duplication. A confirmed entry reaches the work system once. Time without signal is reported apart from sync time.
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