Capabilities Environment Launch
We’re thrilled to announce that the TOEX Capabilities Environment (CE) has been launched today for all eleven TOEX teams.
This ground-breaking development will save investigations significant time and money, ultimately helping to protect more victims and pursue the criminals who would exploit them – thanks to the ongoing effective collaboration with our industry partners.
We have previously highlighted the complexities that accompany investigations involving organised exploitation, caused by a multitude of factors including, high volumes of data or information, language barriers encountered in tackling cross-border criminality, or in the number of resource hours spent manually processing intelligence and evidence.
The launch of these tools through the deployment of a secure, assured and UK hosted cloud platform, will help our teams manage these complex investigations in a more effective and efficient way. The TOEX Capabilities Environment will act as an ‘app store’ for the developed tools and, following completion of mandatory training, will be available to TOEX resources to leverage against organised exploitation demand investigated at a force, regional and national level.
The technical development of each tool follows the principle of ‘operational business need driving innovation’. They have been specifically designed to tackle an identified policing problem, albeit many of them are suitable for deployment against a wide variety of policing threats. Some have been developed in-house by the regional TOEX Data Insight Analysts who sit side-by-side with operational intelligence and analytical staff. This partnership of business requirements, industry collaboration, and addressing operational problems through technical enablers, has innovated and refined tools capable of generating substantial efficiencies in time and resourcing, thus allowing TOEX resources to focus on high-harm offenders and victims.
The TOEX Translation application is the first tool hosted in the TOEX Capabilities Environment. It utilises the AI translation capabilities provided by Microsoft Cognitive Services (MCS) to bulk translate text files.
This tool has already been incredibly powerful in advancing several serious and complex investigations - include the translation of mobile device extractions and social media archives. By January 2024, the TOEX Translation application had been used more than 340 times and successfully translated more than 290 million characters for the total cost of £2,410.
The programme’s technical team is extremely busy testing other tools to add to the CE – these include the TOEX Transcription application, which has the ability to upload audio and video files such as victim and suspect interviews, body-worn video or control room calls, with the AI powered Microsoft Cognitive Services Video Indexer platform performing a transcription within minutes.
The launch of these tools for the TOEX Programme is indicative of an exciting time for innovation across policing, and we will soon share a plan with partners and stakeholders detailing our delivery plan for the onboarding of more capabilities over the next FY.