From Confusion to Clarity: How NG000 Live Translation Enhances Response

Clarity is one of the most important, and most difficult, things to achieve during a 000 call. People are often frightened, confused, or injured, but getting accurate information out of them as quickly as possible is crucial to saving lives.

This challenge is exacerbated by language barriers and misunderstandings. If a caller doesn’t speak the same language as a telecommunicator, communication can go from being difficult to impossible. And in the messiness and confusion of a 000 call, telecommunicators may need to rewind and listen through a call recording to try and sort out the information that was being conveyed.

Australia’s diverse and growing population makes this challenge more difficult for Emergency Service Organisations (ESOs). The diverse population speaks hundreds of languages and even more dialects. And many ESOs themselves may have hundreds of staff responsible for thousands of people. At the same time, statistics bear out that the number of emergency calls is growing every year and pressure is increasing for ESOs to handle calls more efficiently. In this environment it’s crucial for ESOs to have the tools they need to handle any call from any caller quickly and effectively.

Automatic translation and transcription is a powerful tool that ESOs can use to facilitate faster and more accurate emergency response. When language is an issue, live translations and written records of calls give telecommunicators the ready access to situational awareness information they need to effectively respond to emergencies. As Australia moves towards Next Generation 000 (NG000), integrating translation and transcription into emergency call handling will help accelerate emergency response efforts and save lives.

Outracing the Emergency Clock With Accurate Information

When a call is routed to an ESO, a timer starts. Telecommunicators have to capture the crucial information they need — the nature of the incident, where it is, what type of emergency services have to be dispatched — as soon as possible. If a telecommunicator cannot understand a caller, this process becomes vastly less efficient and accurate. To overcome a language barrier, telecommunicators may need to transfer a call to another telecommunicator in the ESO, or to a translator in an external service. This takes time and may require a caller to repeat information. If the transfer is not made seamlessly, crucial time and information may be lost.

Language concerns also make staffing and operations less cost-efficient. To be prepared, ESOs must have staff on every shift to cover every language in their area, as there is no way to predict which language a caller may use. And keeping external translation agencies on call 24/7 adds significant additional costs.

Even without a language barrier, communication can become confused. Information relayed by voice can be unclear, and a telecommunicator may need to cycle through a call recording to double-check information they’ve been given. This can delay information sharing with first responders or even result in wrong information being passed along. A wrong address can delay a response; a wrong piece of situational awareness information, such as the nature of the incident or the services needed, can put both callers and first responders in danger.

Maximizing Clarity With More Seamless Communications

Automatic translation and transcription capabilities are not a replacement for trained translators or telecommunicators. But they are a powerful tool that can help fill critical gaps in information by providing telecommunicators with options where they otherwise did not exist. With real-time translation and transcription, telecommunicators can quickly and accurately gather as much information about a call as possible, even if they had trouble understanding the caller.

When a transfer is necessary, the initial telecommunicator can gather more accurate information to pass to the new telecommunicator, making the transfer much more efficient and seamless. And by capturing critical situational awareness information, from the address of the incident to which services are needed, the emergency response is both faster and more accurate.

Improved clarity also reduces stress on both callers and telecommunicators, which is crucial in already stressful situations. Real-time translation makes it easier for telecommunicators to recognize and work with cultural sensitivity by accommodating how different languages and cultures express distress or urgency. For example, some may hesitate to speak openly due to fear or social norms. By capturing these nuances in a conversation, translation tools ensure vital information isn’t lost.

The clarity translation and transcription capabilities provide goes beyond the original call. Automatically generated transcripts also provide a written record of emergency calls, supporting legal, medical, and operational needs while aiding police investigations, staff training, and performance evaluations.

Automatic and Flexible Capabilities Are Crucial

For these capabilities to be of maximum use to ESOs, it is crucial that translation and transcription happen automatically. Ideally, a call management solution will not only begin translating and transcribing a call as soon as it comes in but also inform the telecommunicator which language is being spoken. This makes the transfer of calls as efficient as possible.

Any translation software should also support the hundreds of languages and many dialects of English spoken throughout the country. Any of these may be used in an emergency call. Quickly identifying which one is being spoken, as well as translating for the telecommunicator, can eliminate seconds or even minutes of delay in an emergency response.

Ideally, call management systems should also be equipped to generate automatic transcriptions as a call goes on. This makes it easier for telecommunicators to leverage their knowledge and experience to identify information that is important during any call. Plus, pre-programing automatic transcription capabilities to highlight specific keywords enables telecommunicators to zero in on key points even more quickly.

Solacom Delivers Deployment-Ready Automatic Translation and Transcription

Telecommunicators need every tool available to do their jobs effectively. Even brief confusion can cost lives. The Solacom Guardian Automatic Translation and Transcription module ensures telecommunicators always have access to the best possible available situational awareness information at all times, letting them make the right decision for the situation as quickly as possible.

A Solacom Guardian Call Handling system equipped with the Guardian Automatic Translation and Transcription module supports more than 70 base languages and 140 dialects. Additionally, keywords can be set to appear in bold in both transcribed and translated audio and text calls whenever the caller mentions them. This purpose-built solution is ready to meet the needs of telecommunicators today, and tomorrow, as Australia continues moving towards NG000.