Who can manage what
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Admin / Owner | Enable/disable Walkie-Talkie for the org; set Record audio, Transcribe, and Retention; see the channel roster; use the emergency banner in the dispatch cockpit |
| Dispatcher | Everything above except billing/tier; can also trigger the All hands broadcast reply-lock by keying that channel |
| Everyone else | Hear and speak on any channel they can access; personal talk-button settings; see the walkie history and search |
The three walkie switches (Walkie-Talkie, Record audio, Transcribe speech to text) and the retention selector all live in Settings → Walkie-Talkie. Only admins can change them.
Plan tier
Walkie-Talkie is a Growth-tier feature. Owners on Starter or Core tiers won't be able to enable it. If you try, the settings page will explain the upgrade path.
Privacy commitments
When Record audio is off, nothing is captured. The client never starts a recorder. Nothing is written to disk on the user's device, nothing is uploaded to us, and nothing is stored. Even if a rogue clip arrived at the server anyway, the server refuses it, the promise is enforced on both ends.
When Record audio is on:
When Transcribe is off, no audio ever leaves PortaPro for speech-to-text processing. Recordings stay in PortaPro's own storage.
When Transcribe is on, PortaPro sends each recording to ElevenLabs Scribe v2 for transcription. Their processing is short-lived; audio is not retained by ElevenLabs for training. Only the transcript comes back and is stored on the transmission row.
Retention presets
The Recording retention dropdown offers:
Both audio and transcripts are deleted at the retention deadline by a nightly cron sweep. There's no per-clip retention override, one value governs the whole org.
Storage details
Cost drivers, in plain English
Walkie-Talkie has three moving cost pieces. You choose which ones apply to your org.
1. Live voice (Agora RTC). This is what makes the radio work at all. It's a per-minute cost tied to how much your team actually keys up. A dispatch team that talks all day costs more than a small crew that only radios for exceptions.
2. Storage (Record audio). Small. Voice clips are tiny at PortaPro's encoding (~240 KB per 60-second call). Retention determines how much you keep.
3. Transcription (Transcribe speech to text). ElevenLabs bills per audio-second of transcribed speech. This scales directly with how much your team talks. Rough scale: a busy dispatcher-led team can put 5–20 minutes per active user per day through the radio; a small shop, much less. Turning transcription off eliminates this line item entirely.
Because these are three separate switches, you can pick the profile that fits:
You can change these settings any time and the change applies going forward, flipping transcription off doesn't delete existing transcripts, and flipping recording off doesn't delete existing clips (the retention sweep still governs what's already there).
Emergency traffic
Even though the emergency button was removed from the everyday talk-button UI, the underlying capability still exists:
The separate Emergency channel that used to appear in the channel menu was retired in September 2026; emergency alerts are not tied to a channel.