 Aloha, welcome back to this episode of Security Matters Hawaii. We're in the Think Tech Studio Hawaii today and we're live with Dan Rothrock. Dan, thanks for coming in brother. Glad to be here. I'm sorry to yank you off the beach because my stepson was good enough to let us have him for a half hour. So we're going to get into some communication. I want to talk about the background because we're all in blue today. That is not a coincidence. It's on purpose. We've got a light Hawaii blue coming up in May 12th to 18th. So go down and get a blue light bulb. You can get free at CityMill to celebrate or to, I guess, honor our fallen law enforcement. Thanks for that. Thanks for watching our blue show today. We're going to talk about communication. We're going to talk about intelligent communication. We're going to talk about critical communication. But first, we're going to have a moment of silence because doesn't that bother you? Don't you want to be able to hear? Anyway, so thanks for coming in. So as it tells been, you know, a major player in this, you've been a major player in the industry. Everybody in the industry knows Dan. Well, I don't know about that part. Everybody in the industry knows. The needs to know about communication comes across you, sir. I can guarantee you that. I appreciate that. Let's talk about what do you think is the most important sort of newest thing that's going on, you know, from your perspective, and then we'll get to a lot of the why. Okay, well, right, because now we're kind of jumping forward and then we can go backwards and fill in. The ones that want to turn us off too quick, we'll go ahead and give them some reason to go. Yeah, there you go. I think the biggest thing that's going on right now is more intelligibility, more audio becoming pervasive in the marketplace. You and I have talked about the fact that how many years have I been standing on a soapbox preaching you have to have audio or you have an incomplete security system, right? And now audio is becoming more and more pervasive. You don't have one or two people stand up on a soapbox going you got to have audio. You have companies like Google and Apple coming in and here's Siri. Here's Lexa. Here's all this voice communication that's now pervasive. So it's becoming more natural and people are starting. It's a key starting to include it in their systems where before it was often overlooked. We take that part and then we move to people being aware that their audio system has to be intelligible. Yeah, it's so good if you can't hear it. Right. I mean, why Bob? Or if it's garbled or if you got to go, can you say that again? Can you say that again? I mean, it's so annoying, right? Well, the old commercial, right? Can you hear me? Can you hear me now? Yeah, can you hear me now? And if you think about that in almost any situation and this is why we changed our tagline a while back. Tagline used to be when communication is critical. Yes, when. Which is always. Which is always. So now if you look at the tagline, it says, with a red slash, it says because communication is critical. Yes. Because there's no conversation that you have in business that's not critical, right? So that's changing. And to your other point about if it's garbled, one of the biggest customer complaints people have about overhead paging in a store or they have about coming to visit a company that has an audio device on the front of it, they can't understand it. They can't hear it. So the intelligibility is the big piece. And then right now, moving things out to the edge. Ah, yes. Right. Moving intelligibility out to the edge. And when we go that direction, we start looking at different versions of AI. Right. Which I refer to more instead of intelligent, instead of looking at that as augmented intelligence. Sure. Right. Awesome. And how we're pulling that data in and what we're using it for. So there's all those things that are changing. And the IT world is giving us some mandates that we have to really look at. And we put all those things on a scorecard, an industry scorecard and then we help you work your way through a decision that gets you something you can hear. Some intelligible audio. And understood. And it's really true. Like businesses, I think, don't often, I don't know, I don't know from my business community out there, if you understand when you have an access control reader on a door, you have some gate, you have some barrier that someone's going to come up against that no one knows they're there and they don't have a way to communicate to your organization, that's a problem. They need to be able to call someone. And I go around to a lot of places in Hawaii where there is no audio device at the point of entry. And but it's locked. People are banging on the door that what are they going to do? How are they going to know to get in? Texting people from outside? Like really? It's so inconvenient. Well, it's worse than that in some cases. And you know, I always talk in stories, right? Sure. So a short story, we're doing a presentation down in Houston in this use the term little old ladies should sweet lady comes up to me and asked what we do. And so I showed her about communication at the door asking her what she did. She said, Oh, we have a device like that on the front of our door. And I said, How do you use it? She says, Well, they come up, they push a button. And then I listen to them. And I said, How does that work? And she goes, It doesn't work at all. Because you can't understand them. I said, Well, then what do you do? She goes, Oh, I push a button and let them in the door. Yeah, with that, without knowing what they said, or they are energy and all of a sudden the look at her face, she goes, Oh, that's not good. Is it? No, that's not. This is why this intelligibility is so important. But you can verify before you make a decision. Yeah, yeah, we've we've I tried to advise me to I want to be able to tell the guy to turn face the camera, put your badge up, depending on who you are, right, right, whatever, whoever you're representing yourself to be. I want to confirm that if I don't know you like we kind of know our delivery people, but what if it's not the norm delivery guy, right? You don't know if he stowed that UPS truck, you don't know who this person is. But you need to need to use voices that very first way to sort of interact without having to even get near somebody, you know, if you can just see him out there, that doesn't really tell you much. You just know someone's out there. Right. And if you can't speak with them. Now you may have been like sending an employee out to interact with this person, you don't know who it is. Right. And that's not safe for your employees. No. And if you think just that you did this at the beginning of the show, where we did that short silence, right? When we were talking before the show started, you were saying this show is available later on YouTube. So you can watch and hear it. Or you can also just listen to it. Yeah, yeah, an audible. But you don't make it available with just video and no audio, right? It doesn't make any sense. We're just not that good looking. We can't we can't hold the audience long enough if it's just video, you know, like we're not exciting. Yeah, you need a better guess for that. It's very true. Like humans, I think in in audios, like old, right, so telephones have been around forever. I think people take it for granted. And when you don't have it, they're like, ooh, what's missing? They, they so often haven't thought about the command and control aspect, you know, you brought up a good point about being able to tell someone to do something, right? So when earlier, when it was sort of like a police intervention, the police wouldn't be able to tell someone get down on the floor, you know, remotely, without having to enter the site or to to endanger themselves, have people do things in a place. So it's not always just listening. It's to be able to be able to speak clearly into a place as well. Well, what we always say is it's the ability to hear, to be heard and to be understood. Yeah, the understanding part's hard. And so understanding that goes back to that intelligibility, right? Sure. But then the conversation has to flow two directions. So the person receiving the call has to be able to hear maybe there's a truck at the gate, right? Oh, yeah, when a noisy environment. Right. So the person in your control room can't understand, because all they can hear is the truck noise. How do we take that out and get rid of that? And now we have the technology, we can do that, we can do it very well. And then in reverse, the unit has to get loud enough so that the truck driver can hear over that noise, right? So here be heard, be understood. That's part of the scorecard of if it doesn't do that, then why put it in? Yeah, and especially for critical, we, in fact, we're able to offer that down in the shipyard, a very, very noisy environment down there. And so they've got, they genitals all over down there. It's amazing what it is able to do for those folks. And they were operating like that before essentially giving up on the stuff they had to scream at each other. Right. And through a fence, at a distance, wherever it was, it was ridiculous, you know, because that was more effective than trying to use the system that they had. And now we're going into a different area, right? A lot of people think on security, they think of emergency notification and paging and that type of thing. But the other piece that people miss for audio is simply business optimization, right? And that's what they're doing down at the port, where they may have had to dispatch a person in a vehicle and tie them up to go there to go, hey, who are you? Who are you? Let me see about waiting, whatever it is. But if we have crystal clear audio and we can communicate those trucks just keep moving and the cost savings in a business optimization model, then it's just huge. That's massive. And the community, you know, the, there's a whole thing, everybody's really into like the customer experience. So, you know, this whole thing of being not, it isn't like security has to be, has like zero touch points. But the easier it is for me to identify you, confirm you, let you in, and that starts with voice first. I mean, to me, you know, that's that call. Hey, how are you? Hopefully I recognize your voice or I know you were coming or you can tell me who you're here to see. I know who that is. We we starting off that I can kind of look and see if it's high security. I can ask you show your badge to the camera. Let me see if that's really whatever. But there's there's so much value in being able to communicate in both directions from that remote endpoint that businesses, I the ones that function badly, which I've walked into those situations, it's they utterly waste minutes an hour per person, which totals up to probably an hour a day per person. Things like that. It's just terrible. We have a project that we're working on right now at a major airport where they're going back and replacing the existing audio with equipment, our equipment now that can remove that noise. It can get louder. It will be intelligible. And the consultant that looked at that facility said your biggest problem from a revenue standpoint is that people can't be understood at the gate. So when somebody comes up, they place a ticket. I'm sure this is happening to you. They place their ticket, there's a problem, they push the button, they try to communicate and when they do, nobody can understand each other. Oh yeah. So what do they do then? They run over the gate. They break the bar. And it merges it, well the operator lifts the gate, right? So they don't get any money, I understand. But the problem is it's not just that person. It's the car behind them and the car behind them and the car behind them and if you've parked at the airport, you know how expensive it is. That revenue is just rolling out because you can't hear, you can't be heard, and they can't be understood. Yeah, nobody knows what's going on. Right. So back to business optimization, not just the security side, but every conversation is critical. Yeah, I was talking with the parking company, we don't do parking barricades ourselves, but we've partnered with some of those companies here that do and their biggest revenue is replacing those bars, especially like downtown because the tourists will get drunk and they don't care about the hotel and they'll just break the bar. And they're made to break away, but they have to come and bolt them back on. So they make service calls, especially every all weekend long, he says, that's all he does, go bolt the bars back on. I'm like, really, this is a serious problem? I don't know if people don't want to pay or they're frustrated because they can't communicate and they're in a rush. It's frustration and then the other part, you mentioned this term earlier, it's the customer satisfaction. If you're in a hotel, the hotel wants you to be happy, right? They want you to have a good time while you're here in Hawaii and they want you to leave happy. But if you have that frustration, it's an experience that is not good and ratings of customer satisfaction will drop. Yeah, over something simple as an intercom. Right, sometimes people don't even think about it. Yeah, think about, think about communications. We are going to take a break. I'm going to find my camera here. We're going to take a break. We're going to be back in about one minute after we pay some bills. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Gwen Harris, the host here at Think Tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of the supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Hey Aloha, welcome back to Security Matters Hawaii. We're with communications guru Dan Rothrock today from Zenitel. Having some fun kicking it around today. Let's take a look at, we got a few talk points. So we were kind of rambling a little bit there earlier. I think I got a slide I can throw up here. Yeah, so this is what we were talking about here and be heard. Noise, clean, weather, vandalism. Noise is a big thing that I don't think people pay attention to when they're specifying a system. I've been out there and you know you go and you're walking around with the client and you he's out there. I need anyone here, I need one there. I'm like, well, what's it like here in the morning? What's it like here at lunch? Oh yeah. Oh, we got all these trucks that come through. It's really loud. Oh, we need to talk about that. So the fact that the equipment has matured to the point where taking care of some of that forest is really important. It's interesting and this goes to the when communications critical and because communications critical. Think about it in different environments. We talked about noise and we showed that industrial piece there and we talked about trucks at a gate and I can't hear. But the thing about audio is you're always in a dynamic environment. Things are changing. Like it's getting louder, it's getting quieter. So it's not just getting loud enough to hear. You know, we talked about the trucks there, but when the Prius pulls in behind the truck, you can't have it at the same volume level. They're going to even bump away and then that customer experience just goes down and your customer rating drops down, right? So when you think about it, the intelligibility needs to be constantly looking at what and analyzing what it's listening to and then modifying changing. But don't just put it at a gate with a truck or at, you know, we talked about the port using it. Think about just other environments where maybe it's a single station, but it's on the front door of your building, right? And people say, well, it's quiet out there. Well, it's not quite. It might be windy in a way. It could be windy in a way. I'll give you another one. We have a great partner that's in Addison, Texas, but they're right next to the airport there. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So they have a little station that I used to tease them about because it wasn't our station. And they said, well, you know, it doesn't matter because we can't hear because of the planes. Mm hmm. Challenge accepted. Challenge accepted. Challenge addressed. You know, let's put a device there that has the intelligence and intelligibility, the intelligence to fix that problem, remove the noise. And so, yeah, you know, technology marches forward and we have an algorithm that will look at what the repetitive noise is, remove that, lower it. So it's like us having a conversation. Yeah. Which it ought to be. Right. We have another thing we didn't talk about yet. So, I think people forget about is that that device isn't just working when people talk. We now today are listening for things happening in the environment. We can hear people running. We can hear gunshots. So, there's things we can do to alert ourselves from that device when it's in that sort of listen mode. Right. So, you can do different software things where it can hear a gunshot. Mm hmm. It can detect aggression. Yeah. Aggression detection. As far as show starts going off the rails and you and I start getting mad at each other, it could say, hey, this is actually aggression. The one thing I want to keep in mind though is it's the device and the intelligence is at the edge. Right. Okay. So, what happens is it's listening at the edge. No one is listening to you. Right. They're listening for an event or something to take place and then it will trigger. Right, right. Just want to make sure that everybody says no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not eavesdropping. Yeah, we're not eavesdropping and recording everything you say which you have to notify people for that stuff anyway. But it's I think people lose the point that that device is actually providing value like 24-7 in certain instances. There's places the malls in particular like the fighting algorithm or the aggression algorithm. I have some other facilities here that are sort of remote and they've had gunshot problems so they like to know if guns are being fired in those areas. And so that's another thing and it's been a good addition because it helps it helps sort of justify the cost. You know, they're getting all the other performance but now they've got this thing working for them 24-7. Well, and that's the other part when we talk about intelligent communication. It's not just the intelligibility of the device. That's kind of number one in the scorecard, right? But if we move beyond that and talk about intelligence and what that means, it's the starting of linking other devices to each other. So you have interoperability and what you can start to do is you can start everybody loves to talk about big data and collecting data and what are you going to do with it? That's what we can also provide is we can collect information. We can share it with other operating systems whether it's access control or a video management system and we can pull all that data into one spot. It can start to give you information that you can really don't want to overuse this word but I guess I'll try it anyhow. Business optimization, right? You can really improve and enhance your business by collecting that information. Yeah, and causing and giving you know, that command and control, you know, bringing the sound of what's happening and that triggers the cameras. That gives us the view of what's happening if they're handheld zooms, it zooms in, gives us some really good, you know, we've got great video capabilities these days and that's all automated. You know, the operator was hopefully awake but the alert went off and now this information is presented and it's useful information. He can really figure out what type of response he needs to do. You know. Well that control room is an interesting situation and we've all seen the movies where there's this 500 cameras. 500 monitors. And one guy's leaving of course because he can't watch them. He can't watch them and it's classic movie stuff, right? Where the guy nods offers looking in the wrong place. If we add the intelligence and we do triggers because now let's look at it this way. We can take a video management system that has the trigger for trespassing. So if you walk into a certain area, the camera sees it, they can notify it. That comes back to the audio system and sends out a message that says, excuse me, but you're trespassing. At the same time it sends an audible note to the operator which then looks at the right monitor to see what's going on. All these things need to start interacting with each other. Yeah, I'm working together, right? And then, and a lot of that is it helps with that response. A guy may have wandered in there accidentally and he's happy to turn around when we play that, excuse me sir, you're in a controlled area. It may be he's there nefariously and now we need to send a further response. But your point's well taken, right? Nine times out of 10 is going to be somebody who unintentionally is in that location. Or at least they're going to act that way once we catch them. Yeah, right, right. Point it out to them. Interestingly enough, there's a lot of statistics that show deploying a camera by itself does not detour any criminal activity. The person still goes ahead and commits the crime. But if you can be proactive, see something, respond to it, and let them know that you're watching, it will actually modify behavior in most cases. Yeah, that audio. Excuse me, sir. That's just like somebody tapping you on the shoulder, right? You're in there doing your little criminal activities and next thing you know it's just like somebody's right there with you. And when you know they can see what you're doing and then they can talk to you about what you're doing, yeah, I think it's highly effective. We've seen them absolutely fleeing area just because their presence is it's not that it's they already knew it was probably detected. If they think anyone's watching the cameras or not, I don't know. But as soon as you speak to them, wow, it's an instantaneous I'm out of here. Yeah, I always use the example. It's the way we were raised, right? So I think I know this is going. I've done a lot of things where my parents were watching me. But I wouldn't have done it anyhow. But when I would hear my mother give me first name, middle name, and last name, it was a quick behavior modification of my behavior, right? And so we're kind of trained that way that as soon as that voice comes in, oh, they're actually paying it. Tension to me, need that. I need to back off and change what I was doing. Yeah, it's kind of like you're already caught. What if you're up to something, even if you're up something, you know, it's just negligence, like we said, some folks are doing that. But you know, they could wander to some place that's unsafe, for example, like out of our, we've got some minds or not minds, but the quarries here and things like that. So people could come into an area that's unsafe that they're unaware of. And you know, they're just out wandering the countryside because you would be if you got into those areas. Right. The ability to notify them that you know, you could be in danger, at least turn around or whatever it may be. Super important stuff. Where else are we using audio? What is our audience not thinking about with audio? I mean, I run into it a lot where it just wasn't specified and so it's not there where I think it needs to be. What else do you see in your experience that's a thing that they're not thinking about there? Well, what ends up happening is in a lot of cases an afterthought or doing what you did at the beginning of the show taking audio away. If you take it away, people go, ooh, that's bad. I really need to have that. It's incomplete. Yeah. It's incomplete. So for us, in a lot of cases, it's just, it's about having a conversation that lets somebody understand the value of having audio built into their security system or into their normal business process. And once you can make them aware that we have to have a conversation here, we have to be able to talk. So what we see happening in the past was people would deploy a lot of cameras. I want to see what's going on over here. I want to see what's going on over here. If you just simply ask the question, now you can see over there, would it be important for you to be able to talk or to listen to that same location? And you have this aha moment. And they're like, oh, I get it. I really should put something there and I should put something here. So it's just any place, this is bigger awareness now, any place where you would want to have a conversation, you need to put an audio point that's intelligible. Yeah. And we saw that spring up as sort of like the blue boxes in the stations. That kind of, people got that what that was for, but they didn't really think about having it a little more, a little more audio fabric out there if I could talk about it. Having a little more pervasive instead of just being the emergency call box. One of the great points that was made by, you know Kelly Lake. Oh yeah. And Kelly's our director of our strategic allowance program. She made a great point and she said, people see the towers, right? Let me back up. People have their access control card. They use it all day long. They may even use it for HR resources. And they check in for work and they pay their lunch and they pay their soda machine with it. So they use that all the time. Video we're familiar with. It's everywhere. It's pervasive. Audio, when we put it into a stanchion in a blue light, that's for emergency. Yeah. I can't touch that button. I get an elevator and there's a button there. Ooh, I can't touch that because it's an emergency. So there's been this barrier. I see. Where it's like, ooh, don't use it unless the world's falling apart or something. And we need to pass that. And again, Syria, Alexa, all this is starting to help us. We want to do things with voice command, with voice activity. And that's going to change where we're going at because audio's going to need, won't have just earned a seat at the table for security. It will be driving. It'll be the seat, yeah. Yeah. There is so much we've talked about. I think there's so much more you can learn about an environment, so much more you can inject into environment if you need to. The ability to give instructions rather than they come from, you mentioned like Syria, then they can interpret things for you, for example. Right. You know, the ability to give people actionable information that they can use and give it to them when they need it instead of, oh, if we could have told you five minutes earlier, you might not have, you know, walked into that crocodile pond. Right, because we're running real time. Yeah. Right, real time. And that's the huge difference. Yeah, right on. Hey, we've got about a minute left, so final word of wisdom. I think that my mom told me anybody that you ever talked to brings something to the table that's important to say. It's your job to listen. And that's our communication point here today is that we need to be able to hear. We need to be able to be heard, and we need to be able to be understood. And that's why audio needs to go into your system. Right. So don't leave the audio out, folks, because security matters. Thank you very much. Aloha.