When we migrated from Zendesk Talk to Genesys Cloud, we had to decide between Dual Channel (stereo) and Mixed (mono) recording.
Zendesk defaults to mixed recording, which saves space but makes it impossible to isolate the customer’s voice from the agent’s voice. We switched to Dual Channel in GC because it makes QA evaluations much easier when callers and agents talk over each other.
If you are using the native Genesys Cloud Speech and Text Analytics, you absolutely must use Dual Channel recording.
In our CXone migrations, we learned that acoustic models require the channels to be isolated. If you use mixed recording, the sentiment analysis engine cannot determine if the ‘angry shouting’ is coming from the customer or from your agent! The system needs stereo separation to accurately map sentiment to the correct speaker.
Why does dual channel take exactly twice the storage space?
I understand it records two tracks, but our AWS S3 billing for bulk exported recordings literally doubled overnight when we flipped the toggle. Is there no compression applied to the stereo file format?
Because the platform exports the dual-channel files as uncompressed stereo PCM .wav or minimally compressed .ogg depending on your policy.
To save on our S3 costs, I run an automated Python script that triggers a Lambda function via AWS SQS. When the bulk export drops the stereo file into our bucket, my script uses FFmpeg to transcode it down to a highly compressed mono MP3 for long-term archival, saving us 80% on storage costs.