Accomplishing critical tasks with a seamless voice solution
Located at the southern end of Lake Huron, Port Huron is a small Michigan town whose law enforcement organization encompasses a large scope of responsibilities in serving its community. The Port Huron Police Department comprises 70 employees across many different departments and functions: In addition to officers and transcriptionists, its staff includes the detective bureau, cadet, major crimes, and administrative departments. To support the wide variety of roles and functions and the need to focus on their critical work (not the technology that supports it), the Port Huron Police Department needs voice solutions that are robust, intuitive, and flexible.
When new needs outgrow old tools
Port Huron had been longtime users of Winscribe dictation solutions, first using specially dedicated digital recording devices then moving to its smartphone app. While the features of the solution itself met the needs of the Police Department, using Winscribe was cumbersome as their IT infrastructure was not open to the cloud.
Further, an administrative development arose, necessitating a change in voice solutions. Winscribe was no longer going to be supported, which meant losing features such as troubleshooting, assistance with upgrades, and more.
A familiar…but finessed…solution
Following extensive research, Gale Kicinski, Records Administrative Supervisor, found that many offerings only did speech to text, which would not meet the needs of her organization as they had too many variables to accommodate. The editing capabilities of the solution the Police Department chose, Philips SpeechLive, made it a standout among other options.
Functional similarity between Philips SpeechLive and Winscribe enabled a smooth transition across the entire workstream. In addition to the ease of use for those in the field, there was consistency with the transcription aspect of the solutions, and the apps had parallel features.
“The evolution to SpeechLive has been extremely smooth, and accomplished with very minimal training,” said Gale Kicinski, Records Administrative Supervisor, Port Huron Police Department
Results that “speak” for themselves
In this line of work, “no news is good news,” and Kicinski considers it a huge success that the adoption of SpeechLive
has gone so smoothly. With satisfied users across the department, and improved performance on all aspects of voice capture and processing, it’s safe to say that the move has been a win-win for this hardworking, multi-faceted law enforcement organization.