Orion Voice Platform

Push to talk combadges are a fantastic way to stay in touch. I am considering rolling them out to all employees. They work very well in a stable wifi environment.

They suffer a little on reliability when moving between networks/driving- especially when the phone picks up a stray open wifi with a password portal that fools the phone into thinking it has internet instead of staying on LTE. Some of that is outside their control, but it felt more could be done with some of the glitches we experienced. Tried to offer our environment testing to support but they were unresponsive.

The appearances of the application are attractive.

The lag in communication. Some phones don’t support it. The application seems to only work if the application is running and on the main screen, not sleeping or running in the background.

The software is easy to use and was smoothly integrated into our office as a communication system. I like that it works off of a cell phone, which you would have near you anyway, so there are no bulky devices or wires attached to your clothing. I like that the earpiece is always attached to you. It is easy to use and every update has made it easier. The sound quality is clear and consistent. I like that there is a choice of colors.

The things That I don’t like are all minor, but valid...the software does not work well if you don’t have an iPhone. They told us that it would work just fine on both platforms, but it really would never work with my Samsung, or with any of the other non-apple phones in the office. Orion made it work, though. They gave us several I phones, and we rounded up a few other spares and everything was fine. Now we just don’t hire anyone whom doesn’t have an apple phone. Haha. Another thing I don’t like is the weight of the “round thing”. It is heavy to attach to clothing and still remain assessable for communication. On several occasions they just quit working, I believe that they were at least mostly replaced by Orion. The cords that attach to the earpieces are long and awkward. Some girls in my office wrap them around their entire upper bodies to avoid the long cord dangling in the way, The earpieces are large and bulky, They come in several styles and sizes, but I was never able to find one that would fit my ear. I had to buy one myself...the speaker sits just outside my ear, the cord is smaller and shorter and it works very well for me.

The best thing about this product is that it is easy to use and easy to master. We like having only one button to push to communicate with each other. Another major pro is the admin interface. The interface makes it easy to add users and groups. The IoT functionality through ITTT is also very cool.

The software can have a few hardware issues from time to time. We have sent back a few devices as they stopped functioning. Orion did replace them for free though.