Revolutionizing Emergency Dispatch: How Locution Systems Fights Fires with Voice

Glenn Neal, founder and CEO of Golden-based Locution Systems, “started out of a basement from scratch” in 1993. Today, the company’s products are involved in emergency dispatch for a population of about 50 million people in all. 

To help his brother, a programmer for Las Vegas Fire & Rescue, Neal developed software to bridge a gap in the department’s computer-aided dispatch system. 

The project led Neal to create a new market. “We were the market maker in automated voice dispatch,” he says. “We went from almost nobody using this automated dispatching to very few places that currently don’t have automated dispatching.” 

Customers for the 23-employee company include fire departments in Las Vegas, Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles.  

READ: Preparing for Wildfire Season: Colorado Embraces Technology for Safer Communities

“The key thing that we have that no one else has is a real, complete human voice,” Neal says. “We have 99.9 percent understandability.” 

Other systems with cloud-based digital voices are closer to 90 percent understandable, he adds. “When it tells you where to go, you know where to go,” Neal says. “However, we don’t want to rely on the cloud for something so critical.” 

The end result is saving five seconds up to a half-minute in emergency situations. Over time, that can eliminate a backlog that could be a half-hour or more and helps ease all-too-common dispatcher burnout. Dispatch departments “can do twice as much with half the number of people,” Neal says. 

Debbie Rohr is Locution’s primary in-house voice talent, “She’s the one who records every single word with a different inflection based on if the word is at the beginning, middle or end of a sentence,” says Kristi McQueen, the company’s sales strategy and planning lead. 

Taking regional accents into account, Rohr typically needs weeks or months to record all the street names and other necessary words for a good-sized city. 

McQueen, a former firefighter, says the diligence pays off. “When a fire comes in, [the dispatcher’s] voice articulates the stress or the panic they’re feeling,” she explains. “Having that clear, concise voice that comes out consistent every single time is super important for the clarity and understanding on the first-responder side to get to the accident as fast as possible.” 

She adds, “Everything in this industry is mission-critical. There’s no room to just go offline.” 

The City of Peoria (Illinois) Emergency Communications Center has used PrimeAlert Voice since 2017. The previous dispatch system “was Band-Aided together,” says David Tuttle, the center’s retired director. Locution’s system eased all the pain points and shaved 40 seconds off the average response. 

“You don’t have to listen to too many agencies that have a competitor’s system to realize Locution has an extreme advantage on the audio quality,” Tuttle says. 

Fire Chief Tom Jenkins of the Rogers (Arkansas) Fire Department concurs. His department has been using Locution’s computer-aided dispatch tools for more than a decade. “We saw a 40 percent reduction in the time it took between receiving the 911 call and beginning to process that and dispatching those fire trucks,” Jenkins says. “What was a new and cutting-edge thing is now part of our DNA. 

“They pronounce street names the same, they never take a bathroom break,” he adds. “Locution operates without missing a beat. In a 911 environment, that’s so important.” 

Denver-based writer Eric Peterson is the author of Frommer’s Colorado, Frommer’s Montana & Wyoming, Frommer’s Yellowstone & Grand Teton National Parks and the Ramble series of guidebooks, featuring first-person travelogues covering everything from atomic landmarks in New Mexico to celebrity gone wrong in Hollywood. Peterson has also recently written about backpacking in Yosemite, cross-country skiing in Yellowstone and downhill skiing in Colorado for such publications as Denver’s Westword and The New York Daily News. He can be reached at [email protected]