 and welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for another episode of Security Matters. Today, we've got a sort of a new announcement. Sia, who's doing all these amazing things lately, has now instituted, or I don't know if that's the word, but has started a new audio and intelligent communications working group. And I'm really excited to have Lindsay O'Leary and Cameron Jeff Donning with me today. We tried to get the chairman, our good friend Dan Rothrock's gonna chair this committee for Sia. He was busy, so we'll get him in another date after he actually does some real work, you know? Then we'll get him on and let him talk about it. But, so Lindsay, thanks for joining me today, Cameron. Thanks for being here. I know Cameron's been on before, but Lindsay, it's your first time on Security Matters, so thanks for taking some time out there. Let's watch, could you share with your audience just sort of your history with our industry? I think I've known you since you joined our industry from, I think, pharma, right? You were pharma a long time ago, right? So you've been, yeah, good. So, but anyway, let our viewers know just, you know, kind of what you've been up to and how you've ended up here and maybe how things are going at Zenitel. Sure, yeah, I actually, when I had graduated college, I had done subprime mortgage lending and then I had gone into pharmaceutical sales and I was just constantly looking for really a good industry. And I have a lot of family that's law enforcement military and I randomly got a call from a recruiter one day and he had said, how would you like to work in the security industry? You made it sound like I was gonna be an FBI agent. It sounded super cool. And I started my career in the security industry at AMAC Technology and that was gosh, 2010. That's when you and I met Andrew and I worked there for some time. I went on to 1LS2, which is an access control manufacturer for those of you that don't know. And I oversaw the consultant program there. So ultimately my job was working with consultants and engineers, designers, architects in order to design access control systems. So for really about that eight, nine years, I was promoting the Zenitel solutions. That's where I reside today. I've been here since April. So right in the cusp of the pandemic, I transitioned roles and transitioned to Zenitel. Zenitel is a leading provider of intelligent communication solutions. We do tons in regards to intercom and public address. And I oversee our consultant program here. So really it's about raising audio awareness, talking about how our solutions can work cohesively with the access control systems, video management systems and all the different technology that's installed for buildings. That's awesome. I think that's in the consultant role, helping them will also help with this working group. I bet if ever we're gonna get our money's worth out of you. I'll see you, right? Hey Cameron, so I don't even know before, but just give our audience your bio there and maybe lead us into the working group and what you know about how it got started. Sure, Andrew, it's good to be back with you. My background in the industry is pretty straightforward, roughly 10 years in the security industry doing nothing but audio. And whereas Lindsay and Zenitel are very focused on the intercom or the public address side of the audio spectrum, we at SoundSecure focus more on the mic pickup side of the spectrum. So even though we're all under the audio umbrella, we focus on very different applications and very different types of installations. At SoundSecure, we see quite a lot of business for point of sale type applications or retail installations, cook service restaurants, convenience stores, where you wouldn't necessarily have public address in a 7-Eleven or in a stop and shop type market, but audio is there nonetheless. So I hope SIA gets its money's worth out of my involvement but I am a volunteer, though I don't know what that means for the working group. But it's exciting to see that SIA is made audio a priority now. And over the 10 years I've been in the business, I've seen all sorts of questions raised about the uses of audio, where it can be used, and frankly, a lot of misconceptions about what you can or can't do or if you can use audio at all. And one of the conversations Lindsay and I had in preparation for this episode was just sharing some of the comments we've heard where someone would say, oh, I've never used audio before, meaning I've never used a microphone at a point of sale but they've used door intercoms all the time for access control systems and that's still using sound. So we see audio get lumped into an overarching umbrella all the time even though the technologies, the uses, the applications vary across a wide range of different applications. So I'm hopeful that through this working group with SIA we'll see some standards crafted, we'll see application guidelines put together in an effort to really show to the entirety of the security industry what's missing from the installations that installers have been doing and how audio can elevate the strength, frankly, of the security system by providing a whole host of new information that video cameras by themselves just don't offer. Right, and I mean, I'm a big command and control guy myself, right? And that ability to hear what's going on and then to speak into a scene when something's happening is super powerful and that only gets left out a lot. I mean, it's interesting. So let's stay with that just a little bit. Lindsay, the consultant community obviously probably the ones that are at Xenotel are sharpest about implementing audio along with their solutions. But is that something that is education still, when and where to put the Xenotel solution and how it fits in different verticals? Is that a thing that you have to teach to the consultant community? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think just as a, for industry as a whole, audio is always the part and piece, the technology piece that really isn't brought to the dance soon enough. So in the 10 plus years, I guess, that I've been in the industry, it seemed like access control was kind of leading end users decision process and consultants were reaching out and they were assessing, which access control platform made most sense for end users. And that process, when you bring in a consultant or even end users directly with their procurement teams, they're typically putting together something called an RFI or request for information. And through that, they're working with the end user, they're assessing what features and functions the end user needs. And then they invite in the manufacturer to come in, talk about their company, they're making a long-term investment in that business. They do a product demonstration and then they do that whole manufacturer shootout and they decide on a platform. Well, interestingly enough, that happens with access control and it happens with video. I would say it probably even happens with visitor management in many different applications, but for whatever reason, audio, that same process, that evaluation process, we're just thought of as, oh, we'd realize maybe after we even deployed, we're not even in the initial design process. It's all of a sudden somebody is outside on the back of a building and they don't have a way of communicating to get back in, oh, maybe we should put an intercom there, right? So it's absolutely about raising awareness anywhere that you have access control and you have a networked camera, there's probably an application for you to have the ability to listen into that area and communicate to it. So yeah, it's, we're really having to ask the right questions and get buy-in and a lot of it's just education, which is why I think it's so timely that Sia is putting together this working group. Yeah, and I like, you mentioned standards, Cameron, the fact that, Lindsay, we've all been there, right? You go to a place, they've got access control on the door and there's no one in the lobby to see you, which was their vision, that somebody should see you there and let you in and there's no audio. There's no way to call from there because it got left out. Or the other, so maybe a standards body can get us some sort of, best practices at least built around where to deploy audio along with access control. The other thing that I hate is when you go, you go to these parking garages and the bar won't go up and I'm not with them guys that runs over it. I know it'll break away and blah, blah, blah. But then you push the button, then you're trying to talk to the guy and you can't hear a word. It sounds terrible. So we need some standards there around, what Dan and what Zenitel promotes as intelligent communications, that ability to absolutely understand what's being said and what you're hearing. The other guy can hear you and you can hear him intelligently. Is this a work, because you're on that microphone in Cameron, is this a thing that people don't understand? Like when the wind blows, they got these little bitty, electric microphones that aren't well designed or whatever it may be. But these noisy audio systems are kind of common in my experience. Maybe it's just Hawaii. Well, hopefully I can come out to Hawaii and help troubleshoot that for you. I'll come too. But I think you're really onto something, Andrew, with the idea of understanding the audio stream or frankly just basic intelligibility. If you can't hear and you can't respond to what's going on, why have audio in the first place? And you're right. There's all sorts of poor performing audio solutions. To your point, how many times have you been on the phone with somebody and they say, hang on, it's a little bit windy. And that's all you hear, even though the phone is right next to their mouth. So for our purposes with not just the working group, but my business, Lindsey's business and the projects that we work on, we wanna be sure that our customers can actually hear what's going on and in the event that they need to respond to it that a speaker has intelligible output. How many times have we been on a phone call and the audio is garbled or you hear every other word and you say, hang on, I can't hear you. Let me call you on WhatsApp. Let me call you on Skype. Let me use a different platform to communicate with you better because I can't understand what you're saying. That translates 100% to what we do in the security industry. We wanna be sure that when someone says something, they can be understood either by a remote monitor or either by a reception area where if you buzz in to get access to a building and no one's there, what do you do? You bang on the door harder. That's not a good solution. Let's make a system where you can hear well, you can respond well and everyone can understand what's being said. And I mean, when it's security related, often this is sort of an emergency situation, right? So there's an element of time where we don't have necessarily time to make another call or open another channel. We really need this audio channel to be open and reliable 100% of the time in the same way we rely on the video or the door position switch or whatever it may be as a component of the security solution. Will, do you think that this working group will be able to sort of harden some of those ideas? I saw that research and maybe publishing some research into these problems, are they well understood by industry or is audio just not, I don't know if the word's correct but is it not applied the way it ought to be often enough to enable good communication channels to get where they're needed? I think, Andrew, that if you look at the types of folks in our industry who have been installing cameras for years and years, 15, 20, 30 years sometimes, they have a lot of experience doing video. But when it comes time to install audio alongside video, some of the considerations about the right way to put in audio are very different from video. And so it's a little bit of an apples orange comparison where things like placement of a device of a microphone or a speaker or an intercom are very different than what you would have for a camera. So for our purposes with this working group and frankly just with our own business, we do quite a bit of work in terms of helping people with proper layout, proper placement of devices so that we're sure that they work well and you're not gonna pick up the hum from HVAC event but rather you can hear people talking and you can understand what's being said and if need be in an emergency situation you can respond clearly and effectively. Awesome. All right, I love this. So we're with Cameron Javdani from Sound Secure and Lindsay O'Leary from Zenitel and we're gonna pay some bills for about one minute. We'll be right back, stick around. Aloha, welcome back to Security Matters. We are with Lindsay O'Leary and Cameron Javdani today and we're talking about this new audio and intelligent communications working group that Sia has stood up. Dan Rothrock's gonna chair it. We will, we'll hear from him after he gets some work done, maybe Q1 or something like that. We'll get him on to talk about what they're accomplishing. But we were just talking about some of the problems with, you know, everybody kind of knows how to, a lot of our industry types know how to deploy a camera know how to deploy an access control solution but these audio solutions have their own parameters that really need to be paid attention to in an environment. I know I'm a little bit older school with some of these deployments and some of the applications but we were doing some analytics with some of the listening, some of that audio that was coming in. So it was giving us some additional types of intelligence in the past. Is this a thing that we're still doing, Lindsay? Is this, you know, what's happening with that world out there? Maybe that's some, also I think something this working group could help us define maybe a little bit better. Yeah, I mean, for us, we obviously promote intelligent communication solutions. So there's a lot of intelligence that's built into our device that's even right at the edge. So for us, when you think about the different applications where you might install these devices having good quality audio and indoor types of environments can be really easy. But at the moment you put that out at a gate or you put it out in a campus environment, you put it next to an AC unit, it might even be fine for the majority of the day but there could be some construction going on and all of a sudden, you know, you don't have good intelligibility. And the whole reason you're putting that device there in the first place is because you need to have effective conversations and be able to effectively listen. So our devices actually have intelligence built into them at the edge where we can filter out any of that ambient noise and then we can project on the receiving end. So if that person is in a noisy environment, they still get that clarity of audio when you have intelligible crystal clear communications. So we're really fortunate on that front. I do think in regards to this, see a working group, you know, obviously one of the primary efforts is audio is so pervasive in our daily lives. We have Alexa at home and control of our homes and we use Siri and you get in your car and you can have, you know, use it to play music or read text messages. But yet in the security industry, you know, Dan's been beating this drum, you know, about the three-legged stool and situational awareness and access control and video and audio, but yet the adoption still isn't quite there. So I think that the first goal of the see a working group is really gonna be discovery around how do we get invited to the dance earlier? Why is audio in the security space not adopted now? It's adopted everywhere else. We're seeing technology start to encompass that. And then I think the second piece, as we bring in different stakeholders from different technologies, whether it's camera companies, analytic companies, cloud companies, I think they'll be able to kind of zoom out, look at that five-year holistic approach and figure out how we can leverage those analytics and evolve the technology, maybe not even just in the audio front, but for video companies access control, whatever it may be. Yeah, and then, so let's talk a little bit about the, sorry, well, once we start to integrate this, and there's always been concerns about the cybersecurity wrapped around these. So when we talk about secure and audio that we've recorded as an example, where are we, or do you guys address that with the consultant level? I mean, Cameron, do you see this kind of stuff coming at you, these questions about, okay, I've got this listening capability now. I'm deploying it. I've got the audio being streaming to the cloud streaming to a server. Are people hardening or concerned about hardening that, and are there even regulations around the storage and maybe encryption of those audio files? I'm not aware of myself. So that question has come up quite a bit more in the past, we'll say six or 12 months than it has in the rest of my experience in this business for two reasons. One, I think just basic awareness of the need for cyber hardened security systems, but also because of the NDAA and being sure that if you're using security technologies in the United States that you have compliant equipment, for our purposes, 90 plus percent of the time our devices connect to an IP camera. And so by using the cameras, cybersecurity protocols or NDAA compliance, then we buy all under that umbrella. But we see the interest in that growing with respect to storage or how long to keep data that varies wildly. We might have a small retailer just need to keep it for a week or two, and in case something happens or there's a security incident, they have it archived. Whereas in public sector projects, you see requirements stretching beyond 12 months sometimes even longer. So it varies quite a bit, quite a great deal in terms of how long the storage requirements are. The good news is for audio though, we're talking about a tiny fraction of storage space compared to video recording. I mean, it's almost a rounding error when you think about it. We recommend as a rule of thumb to calculate one megabyte per minute of storage, which when you compare to any kind of megapixel resolution and now foreign AK cameras, you almost don't even need to calculate it because it's such a small percent. But at the same time, you do get that clear signal and you get the understandable, intelligible audio of what happened. We see the demand for that also increasing in applications like remote monitoring. And so when you mentioned something like gunshot detection, when you go to a security control center or an operation center and they need to verify that alarm, you can play back that sound that caused the alarm, marry it up with the video feed and say, do you see someone with a weapon? Do you see someone yelling for help or hear someone yelling for help rather? And so you can instantly verify those types of alarms using an audio video solution. But again, it's something that a camera by itself just wouldn't give you. So, and so Lindsay, have you seen that same thing like with the consultant community that you're talking about so that we've got to, or maybe that's where some type of standards might help us if we said we need such and such DB of clarity, right? Some sort of decibel level as a requirement of clearance. Or, and now you were talking a little bit about the bandwidth as well, Cameron. So that's where I lost you about. I remember doing eight by eight systems, seems like 15 years ago and the audio channel was about 8K compared to the video channel, right? Which was, I don't remember back then, but I know that audio doesn't take a whole lot of space. Are the consultants community, are they actively storing video as part of their solutions? Does it come from the client side or is it something that they recommend that people deploy and pay attention to? Are you talking about video or for audio? On the audio side, yeah. So when they're bundling that in, is it driven by a customer requirement? Are there, do you come across like compliances in different states around audio that's different from video? I just don't, I'm not aware of the rules. Yeah, and I think Cameron actually probably knows a little bit more about the legality front. I know when him and I were prepping, he was telling me a little bit about that. You know, only being at Zenitel for six months, I've asked those questions. It does vary state by state. I actually grew up in California. And in California, you have to be very careful about recording and signage if you are recording. And then I recently moved to Texas, and I guess here, and I don't wanna misspeak, but I'm pretty sure that you don't even have to have signage that really they can record you at any point, provided you're in a public setting that that video can be recorded and also the associated audio. But it is specific to each location customer needs. But when you think about incidents and whether you're having a live event and you need to be able to listen into what's transpiring and you need to be able to communicate, you could still have that two-way communication without recording that audio. So there still is tremendous value in having audio devices, whether you're recording or not. One thing we are seeing a ton of requests for right now though, based on the pandemic is prerecorded messages because policies and procedures are changing, week by week, month by month. So, as people slowly start to return to work, they are taking advantage of event-based prerecorded messages that can let people know you need to stay six feet apart, you need to be wearing a mask. And as that evolves until we all potentially go back into the office type settings, they can easily make those changes on the fly. So, but the recording piece is a little bit varied. That's interesting, I hadn't thought about that. So Cameron, is there a position that CIA has or that our industry has around video currently that we've messaged to government? Or I'm pretty sure there are differing state laws about Lindsey's point about signage and awareness for the consumers in spaces and things like that. Is there a position that we have as an industry? I'd say it's definitely outside of my area of expertise here. Andrew, that's one of the things that this working group will tackle with respect to the differences state by state. There's two ways to answer that question. One is to put on my lawyer hat, even though I'm not a lawyer, and refer to all the different state statutes in all 50 states in DC and Puerto Rico. If you're interested in that, by the way, you can go to our website sound-secure.com and there's a handy reference chart where you can look at the actual statute in your state and see what it says. The second way to answer that is just the common sense way, which doesn't always mix with the legal world, right? But when you think about it, we use audio in all 50 states. You have call centers in all 50 states that record phone calls. And when you call a customer service line, what's the first thing you hear? This call is recorded for training or for quality assurance or for whichever reason of the day that they're giving you. So I've been involved in audio recording projects in all 50 states in the country and a number of international markets as well. The question isn't necessarily, is it legal? Is it illegal? Can you do it? Can you not do it? But rather, how do you do it? And when I get asked the question, can you use audio? To me, it's a little bit like asking the question, can you drive a car 50 miles an hour? And if you're going down a residential neighborhood, no, of course not, the speed limit's 25. You can't drive 50. But if you're driving on the highway, you in fact need to speed up and do a little bit more. So just like you would never put a video camera in a restroom or a fitting room in a department store, there are certain places you wouldn't put a microphone either. But we always recommend it sound secure, provide notification through one means or another, be it signage, be it an employee memo, or other ways to remove that expectation of privacy and let people know that there's audio on site. And frankly, video as well, even though the statutes are a little bit different. So one of the questions we get, not necessarily more than others, but it's pretty darn close is, hey, I wanna use audio, what steps do I need to take to be sure that I'm using it the right way? And answering that question in a standardized way will absolutely be a focus of this working group. That's awesome. Well, we're getting down, we've got a couple of minutes left. Lindsay, you wanna give us your final thoughts on maybe some things you expect from the working group or maybe the marching orders Dan thrown at you already? Well, I mean, I think it's gonna be an evolving process, but really as the coalition starts to evolve, I just think it's really important that if anybody does have interest in providing feedback, whether it's in the security realm or even technology that's maybe outside. I mean, I think we understand the importance of audio, but the more resources we get with different backgrounds, we all, even if, you know, for us, we've all been in the security industry, but we've all lived through different customer experiences, different applications. And I think it's just gonna be really nice if we can open up this group and can get more feedback from a really diverse type of audience. Awesome, I hope so. Cameron, your thoughts or some, your expectations for the group? Well, I think we're bringing together a great coalition in the industry with all types of subject matter expertise in audio. And, you know, again, I think that the sector of the industry that has used sound for security systems gets lumped together too often, even though the types of technology that we have are vastly different. The example of sound secure versus Zenitel, right? We don't go head to head. We don't really have a matching product line, but we get lumped in the audio umbrella, though that what we offer is very different. So I'm excited to see the different types of folks who are going to volunteer for this working group and excited to put a brain trust together, if you will, about the best ways to not just apply audio and sound to different types of security systems, to different types of remote monitoring applications, but really craft that best practices guide that shows how installers and how end users can take advantage of sound technologies to make their systems a little bit more strong. Awesome, well, I'm looking forward to it. Command and control needs audio. Check out Tia's Audio and Intelligent Communications working group, be a part of the solution people. Thanks so much, Lindsay. Thanks for joining me, Cameron. Thanks for being here. Join next week. Cameron's going to be guest hosting and we'll talk about that one later. Take care, everybody. Aloha.