Ask your cameras what happened

Finding the moment that matters is the slow part of CCTV

Most sites have plenty of cameras recording plenty of footage. The hard part is getting an answer out of it.

When something goes wrong, the usual routine is familiar. Someone notices a damaged fence, a missing pallet or a skip that has been moved, and the questions start. When did it happen? Which camera saw it? Was it a vehicle or something else? Answering them means logging in to a recorder, picking a camera, guessing a time window and scrubbing back and forth through footage until the right moment appears. On a large site with many cameras, that can take a long time, and it often falls to whoever happens to know how the recorder works.

Alerts have a similar problem. A basic motion alert tells you that something changed in a camera view, but not what. You have to open the clip, watch it and work out for yourself whether it matters. At two in the morning, or in the middle of a busy shift, that is a lot to ask.

Woodcock AI changes both sides of this. It describes what happened in plain English, and it lets you ask your cameras about it directly.

Every alert explains what happened

Each Woodcock AI alert arrives with a short, plain-English description of the event alongside the clip.

Instead of a bare notification, you get a sentence you can read at a glance, describing what the camera saw. That makes it much quicker to decide what to do next. If the description tells you a vehicle has driven into a closed yard, you know to look straight away. If it tells you something routine, you can check the clip when it suits you.

Plain-English descriptions also make alerts easier to share. You can pass one on to a colleague, a keyholder or a manager without needing to explain what they are looking at, because the alert already says it. Anyone who receives it understands the event, even if they have never used a CCTV recorder.

Descriptions sit alongside everything else Woodcock AI does, from smoke and fire detection to intrusion detection, and they work on the cameras you already have. See how it works for the full picture, from camera to alert.

Ask direct questions about your footage

You can ask Woodcock AI direct questions about what your cameras have seen, in the same everyday language you would use with a colleague.

There is no need to know camera numbers, recorder menus or exact timestamps. Type the question the way it comes to you, such as whether anything came through the gate after you locked up, or when a shutter was opened, and the answer comes back in plain English. If you know roughly when or where something happened, mentioning it helps narrow the answer down, but you do not have to.

This is useful well beyond incidents. Questions can help you check that a delivery arrived, see whether a gate was left open, or confirm that a quiet weekend really was quiet. Because anyone can ask a question in plain words, getting answers from your CCTV no longer depends on the one person who knows how the recorder works.

New to AI on CCTV? Our guide to what AI CCTV is explains the basics in plain English.

Example questions and answers

These examples are illustrative. They show the kind of question you can ask and the kind of answer you get back; they are not taken from a real site.

Download the exact clip you need

When you ask about footage, you can download the matching clip, so the answer and the evidence arrive together.

That saves the slowest part of the old routine: finding the start and end of an event, exporting it from the recorder and getting the file to whoever needs it. Instead, the clip that answers your question is ready to download and keep. You can store it with your own records, attach it to an incident report or pass it on to your insurer or the police if they ask for it.

If you are thinking about how footage is shared and kept, our guide to AI CCTV and GDPR covers footage requests, sharing and retention for UK businesses.

Alerts, questions and clips in one place

Descriptions, questions and clip downloads work alongside the rest of Woodcock AI.

Alerts tell you about events as they happen, each with a plain-English description and the clip. Questions let you look back and ask about anything your cameras have seen. Clip downloads give you the footage that goes with each answer. Underneath, the AI is tailored to your site: it learns your cameras and retrains from your feedback, and you can set alert schedules for each camera so alerts arrive when they are useful.

All of it runs on the CCTV you already have, with processing on a Woodcock AI edge server on your site or in the cloud.