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Building in evolution
CyberTech International has been involved in the development of software for digital storage and analysis of telephony and radio communication for 20 years. BAPCO Journal speaks with Luisa Pollini-Kommu, CyberTech’s Marketing Manager for the UK, about some of the latest developments in the field.
For Pollini, at the heart of telephony recording for the emergency services is security – ensuring that call recording is absolutely secure. As regards CyberTech’s Recording Solution the company uses 256-bit Rijndael AES audio encryption that allows its calls to be used as admissible evidence in court – key both for the police and the ambulance service.
“In the past such security was not available but now it is fundamental, both in the sense that it cannot be tampered with, and of who is allowed to play back recordings.” In Pollini’s view, systems need to be put into place giving access only to those who should have it. “In the old days you had to wait for days to get okayed, but now it is a fairly immediate procedure. Also, previously you had to go through tapes and tapes before identifying the call, but now it is much easier thanks to the inbuilt solutions which allow you to do all sorts of things.”
Pressing a button to play, then stopping and rewinding a taped call is in the past. “Now you can graphically add bench marks to a visual timeline of a call, for example, at the point where the crime victim started talking etc. You can also add text notes to that bench mark, and you can search for key words in the text. These are now becoming standard solutions.”
A trend evident in emergency services is to proactively seek in-built technology that can improve interactions with the public. “Especially as regards the evolution of call handlers. The services are looking for solutions that have in-built evolution capabilities to ensure that the service provided is of the best quality and that training needs can be identified easily. Here is an in-built solution that basically allows the supervisor to have a consistent flow of information regarding the quality of call handling.”
One such example of future proofing can be found in call archiving. And an aspect that makes CyberTech unique, says Pollini, is that its solution allows services to easily scale up. “If you need ten terabytes of hard drive then that is easy to do, and you can scale up the number of channels and the archiving capabilities. The challenge is to provide sound structures that allow not just for the growth of the service but also for flexibility to the changes in the outside world.”
Recent solutions: Yorkshire Ambulance Service
Yorkshire Ambulance Service’s virtual call centre handles around two million calls per year, 600,000 of which are emergency calls. All calls are recorded, and YAS audits three per cent of all calls for quality assessment and identification of training needs.
YAS uses CyberTech Recording Solution to support its virtual call centre. Radio, VoIP and telephone conversations are recorded and stored at five sites. “We chose CyberTech’s recording solution because it provides us with optimum risk management and operational flexibility to match our requirements. Its intuitive user interface makes it very easy to use and allows us to achieve total resilience and reliability by storing calls locally at each site as well as remotely, archiving them to our existing storage servers,” commented Assistant Director of Information Management and Technology David Johnson. The Solution comprises networked recorders at each site, providing up to 56,000 hours of local on-line storage.
Gloucestershire Constabulary
CyberTech provides Gloucestershire Constabulary with a resilient digital recording solution and the XQ quality management solution to meet National Call Handling Standards.
An ambient recording solution for the Constabulary’s control rooms is also in place, where proximity microphones can be invoked during major incidents to record commands and discussions that take place in the control room. This means an incident is recorded continuously, allowing real time playback of an entire incident, including telephony and radio traffic, via CyberTech’s Incident Replay application.
Gloucestershire has also expanded its functionality, as Police Sergeant Mark Woodward commented; “We are moving to a Raid 5 archive system that provides the potential for storage of a rolling seven years’ worth of immediately available online recordings. We are experiencing increasing demand for older material to support high profile cases and the expansion will provide efficiencies and high quality service in support to the criminal justice process.”
