Recording Agent Interaction

Recording Process

From V10.7 - The actions taken by various SCC components in producing and saving audio and video files are listed in the table under Recording Process details below. Behaviour and file locations can be specified in each component's configuration file.

The table below shows the abbreviations used in this topic, and the location of each configuration file:

Abbreviation Application Configuration file Location
STG Softdial Telephony Gateway™ \<root>\STG\Config.xml Server
DCAP Desktop Capture client C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Sytel\DCAP Client
Rec Mon Softdial Recording Monitor™ \<root>\RecordMonitor\RecordMonitor.exe.config Server

Fig. 1 shows the workflow described below as a diagram.

Softdial Recording Monitor™ Workflow

Fig. 1 - Audio and Video Capture Workflow

The actions numbered below refer to the red numbers in Fig. 1.

Note that some actions described only occur if a particular key has a particular value in its configuration file, as detailed below.

# Component Action Only if this key... has this value
1 STG Produces WAV audio recordings (in response to a Request Recording [RR] message)
Writes files to <callRecordingPath>		 -  
2 DCAP Produces MP4 video files, captured by default at 10 video frames per second.

On session completion, these are saved by default in the localStorage subfolder of the application folder on the client.

 -  
3 DCAP The MP4 file is then sent to <mp4Filepath> on the Softdial Recording Monitor™ server (as specified in \Softdial\RecordMonitor\Aggregator\Config.xml) by simple file transfer. -  
4 Rec Mon Rec Mon monitors two directories:
  1. <AudioPathToMonitor> (prior to V10.7, this was <pathToMonitor>)
  2. <VideoPathToMonitor>

Rec Mon processes audio and video files whenever new files appear there, matching any audio and video files with the same meta data ID tag.

If these point to the same directories as those in #1 (<callRecordingPath>) and #3 (<mp4Filepath>) above, Rec Mon will process as soon as they are completed.

 -  
5 Copies the WAV file into <mirrorRoot> and <LocalRepositoryPath> KeepWavFile true
6 Merges the WAV file with the video MP4 into a composite MP4 MergeAudioWithVideo true
7 Compresses the WAV file. Currently only MP3 format is available. Compression MP3
8 Copies the MP3 (if produced) and merged MP4 files into <mirrorRoot> -  
9 Copies the MP3 (if produced) and merged MP4 files into <LocalRepositoryPath> -  
10 Insert file record into database, for later search and retrieval

For more detail on the contents of a database record, see Database record fields below

    
11 Once processed, deletes the original files:
  • WAV from <AudioPathToMonitor>
  • MP4 from <VideoPathToMonitor>
 -  
12 Moves original WAV, compressed MP3 and merged MP4 files into <TenantArchiving>, according to <daysBeforeArchive> and <daysBetweenDiskChecks> enableArchive true
  1. DCAP client will record activity on all agent screens
  2. Rec Mon will always process video recordings. The MergeAudioWithVideo setting determines if Rec Mon should merge audio files with video files, in voice sessions. This setting is useful where customers record agent screens ONLY in non-voice sessions, so a WAV file does not exist. In this scenario, set MergeAudioWithVideo to false so all wav files can be processed immediately, without having to wait for video to arrive.
  3. If <MergeAudioWithVideo> is true, Rec Mon will wait <TimeToWaitForVideo> for the video file. If the video file does not arrive within this specified time, Rec Mon assumes that the call has no video and an MP4 is not produced. The WAV file is kept in <AudioPathToMonitor> while waiting for the video.
  4. If <KeepWavFile> is disabled, Rec Mon does not guarantee video recovery.
  5. On start-up, Rec Mon will process all WAV files found in <AudioPathToMonitor>. Therefore, to process any existing recordings, simply start Rec Mon.
  6. The Rec Mon web client may display up to 3 entries for the same call session (the output of steps 5 and 9, all located in <LocalRepositoryPath>, as shown in Fig. 1);
    1. the original WAV file
    2. the compressed MP3 file
    3. the merged MP4 file
  7. To use Rec Mon across different domains, domain paths can be configured with proper credential information in the configuration file. Domain paths should follow the format <domain>\<user>:<password>\\<host>\path, e.g sytel\johnc:123\10.0.0.1\c$\rec
  8. Spoof Agents are not displayed if <ShowSpoofAgents> is disabled.
  9. Rec Mon will notify via email when the disk space available is too low, as set in Aggregator.exe.config. The emails are sent into <EmailDestinations>

Audio WAV to MP3 conversion uses variable bitrate compression by default. From v10.7.1882, fixed bitrate conversion is also possible.

See the Compression configuration options.

Prior to v10.7.1882, quality is set via the CompressionQuality key. See Variable bitrate compression below.

From v10.7.1882 - To use

  • variable bitrate compression, leave the CompressionFixedBitrate value empty (default). The CompressionQuality value is then used. See Variable bitrate compression below.

  • fixed bitrate compression, set the CompressionFixedBitrate value to a permitted value. See Fixed bitrate compression below.

For the CompressionQuality key, a lower value is a higher quality. 0-3 will normally produce transparent results, 4 should be close to perceptual transparency, and 6 (default) produces an "acceptable" quality.

Value Bitrate range (kbit/s)
0 220-260
1 190-250
2 170-210
3 150-195
4 140-185
5 120-150
6 100-130
7 80-120
8 70-105
9 45-85

Permitted values for the CompressionFixedBitrate key are as below, with corresponding output file sizes.

  File size
value per second (KB) per minute (KB) per hour (MB)
8k 1 60 3.6
16k 2 120 7.2
32k 4 240 14.4
48k 6 360 21.6
64k 8 480 28.8
128k 16 960 57.6
'' (empty) Variable bitrate compression will be used

Videos can be recorded with 4 levels of quality - 1 (lowest) through 4 (highest). This can be set in the Quality key in Aggregator.exe.config. Every increase in quality roughly doubles the size of the MP4 file.

The quality value specified in Aggregator is equivalent to a FFmpeg CRF value as follows:

Quality value CRF Visual quality File size
1 34 Lowest. Minimum desirable to capture all screen details Smallest
2 28 Medium-low Small
3 22 Medium-high Medium
4 16 Highest. Effectively lossless to most people Largest

To help gain an understanding of the disk capacity requirements for your operation:

  1. download the Video Disk Space Calculator spreadsheet (zipped, 21Kb)
  2. enter the values for your specific operation

The following fields are recorded in the database (see Fig. 1, item 10):

Field Description Datatype
ID An auto-generated GUID for the entry in the database varchar
Campaign The campaign name varchar
Agent The agent name varchar
OriginalFileName The recording file name varchar
Session An internal identifier for the session varchar
TelephoneNumber The called/ calling party telephone number varchar
AgentOutcome The outcome selected by the agent int
TelephonyOutcome The outcome recorded by the telephony layer int
Committment The commitment value varchar
SuccessRating The success value int
CallStartTime The date and time of the start of the recording datetime
CallLength The duration of the call int
CustomTag[1 to 6] User defined tags varchar
ArchiveDate The date and time of tenant archiving (see Fig. 1, item 12) datetime
FilePath The full path to the recording varchar
WavCheckSum Internal error check varchar
Mp3CheckSum Internal error check varchar

SessionUniqueId

 An auto-generated GUID for the session (i.e. the YS parameter) varchar

Direction

 Inbound or outbound int
RecordingType a - audio

av - audio & video

 varchar
RecordLength From v10.7.1914 - The duration of the recording (which may or may not be the same as CallLength) varchar

  If... Then...
1 Rec Mon is stopped while processing a recording the worst case is that there are multiple entries in the database for the same recording. This is because Rec Mon will only delete the WAV file from <AudioPathToMonitor> after copying it into <LocalRepositoryPath> and <mirrorRoot>. Thus if Rec Mon restarts and the WAV file is still in <AudioPathToMonitor> it will be processed again and placed in the Duplicated folder in <LocalRepositoryPath>
2 STG stops working, or the WAV file is incomplete or has invalid XML data Rec Mon will place the recording in the Failed folder in <LocalRepositoryPath>
3 DCAP or Aggregator stop working and <MergeAudioWithVideo> is on no MP4 files will be produced, but Rec Mon will still wait the duration of <TimeToWaitForVideo> anyway.
4 either the database or the <AudioPathToMonitor> folder is not accessible the recordings will remain in <AudioPathToMonitor>