Control rooms  |  2022-03-30

CentralSquare & Exacom Bring Recordings into CAD

Source: The Critical Communications Review | Gert Jan Wolf editor

Throughout CentralSquares' partnership with Exacom, public safety end users receive seamless access to more information quicker and with minimal effort.

With most CAD platforms and logging recorders, users who need to access audio regarding a specific incident must pull up the CAD report, and then do a manual search of their recorder to find related audio records. It’s easy for records to get overlooked with this method, and it requires using multiple pieces of software across multiple windows. It’s an inefficient way to pull records and can cost emergency communication centers and dispatchers valuable resources.

With this first-of-its-kind integration between CentralSquare and Exacom, this manual process gets streamlined with the help of data convergence. Once a CAD event is closed, all recordings from Exacom’s HindSight Multimedia Logging Recorder are automatically tagged and exported to a NAS location. A link to that file is automatically added into the CAD system for that incident number. This allows users to easily reference all audio pertaining to an incident when viewing CAD reports. This integration is now live within CentralSquare® CAD Enterprise and will be released for the CentralSquare® CAD Professional solution later this summer.

In addition to Exacom pushing information into the CentralSquare’s CAD platforms, the HindSight recorder can also receive information from these systems. The HindSight recorder gets information from the CAD system about an incident, including info on the phone call, call-taker position, dispatch response, when units were cleared from an incident, and when an incident was closed. That incident number for 911 calls gets added into transmission recordings for radio unit IDs. This allows users to quickly locate incident records within HindSight.

“We’re committed to investing in new solutions that provide powerful data to help our customers build safer communities,” said Dara Brenner, Chief Product Officer at CentralSquare. “Our partnership with Exacom gives our public safety customers seamless access to more information quicker and with minimal effort, which means more time focusing on what matters.”

“This effort is a long-time coming for customers,” said Exacom President & CEO Al Brisard. “In Exacom’s pursuit of streamlining emergency response for our customers, we strive to not just get multimedia recorded but to also get that multimedia out of the recorder in a way that is meaningful and actionable. We’re also aware of how understaffed many emergency centers are; we’re expecting this integration will save them valuable resources.”

CentralSquare is the first CAD company to leverage Exacom’s HindSight Application Programming Interface (HSAPI), which was released last year. The API allows other software vendors to extend the capabilities of their CAD, PSAP/call-taking, analytics, or Business Intelligence (BI) platforms to utilize the audio, screen video, text/SMS and metadata that is captured within the Exacom recording platform.