Last Updated on September 18, 2026
Anyone who’s worked on a factory floor, healthcare facility, or large property or venue knows the utility, immediacy, and flexibility of being able to talk to other parts of the operation in real-time – even when they’re not standing right next to each other. Voice has been and continues to be the dominant interface of the frontline, but sometimes, certain observations lend themselves to images. So we’re making that part of the record with picture messaging now live in Relay.
Starting this month, the Relay for Frontline Teams app is being replaced by two apps that serve unique purposes: Relay Communicator, for everyday communication, and Relay Admin, for configuration and fleet management. Both are now available in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Here’s the most exciting part of this change: Communicator now includes in-app picture messaging – a feature we’ve worked with teams to achieve for years.
What Doesn’t Change: Voice is the Interface.
Relay will always be a voice-first platform. Voice is in our DNA: it’s the interface we’ve spent more than a decade engineering around, and it will remain the center of this platform, just as it remains at the center of every frontline workflow.
A worker in gloves, in a 105-decibel room, with both hands operating industrial machinery, cannot stop to type into a screen or walk away from their stations to record information in real time. An employee on a busy casino floor cannot leave their post to log an incident on a tablet in a back room. Walk any floor and you’ll see it: the most important, accurate, and immediate information moves by mouth. Not through the CMMS, not on the whiteboard, not in an email — spoken, in the moment, to whoever is standing there. It’s because voice is the fastest and most intuitive tool available when your hands are full.
But, at the end of the day, some situations need to be shown, not just told. While voice may be the dominant frontline interface, but there are instances that require other forms of information, too. For example, a hairline crack in a weld, a damaged sink in a hotel room, or a malfunctioning slot machine in the middle of a sea of casino games.
What Changes: A New Way to Interact with Frontline Operations
In Relay Communicator, you take a photo and send it to the same channels that your teams are already communicating on. The image doesn’t go into a separate photo app or a shared drive that someone has to go find later. It arrives in the same channel as the voice traffic around it, attributed to the person who sent it, timestamped, and anchored to the point in the operation it came from. The picture already appears surrounded by the conversation that produced it, and is available to view from any other Communicator App users and dispatchers using the Relay Dash on a desktop.
That’s what makes it an additive feature. A photo on its own is just a photo. A photo sitting inside the exchange that prompted it carries the same operational weight as everything else on that channel. It reads as part of the record, because it is.
Different Form Factor for Different Roles
While the Relay device is purpose-built for the frontlines and provides the audio quality, durability, and more that they need, a screen-based interface can have a place in certain physical operations, too. A few places we expect it to earn its keep first:
- Maintenance dispatching. A maintenance manager who hears the description and sees the evidence can coordinate techs to arrive with the right tools in hand. Voice gets them moving immediately; the image gets them moving efficiently.
- Quality call outs. A quality manager who sees a defect can make the call immediately from the lab, without needing to walk the line and confirm. The conversation still happens on the channel, it’s just resolved quicker.
- Near-miss documentation. Industrial environments are dangerous, and the better a site can document near-misses, the safer they become. Pictures are a critical component of near-miss documentation and can speak a thousand words during safety trainings.
- Shift handoff. Handoffs already run on Relay at thousands of sites. Attaching an image to the handoff means the next crew inherits not just what was said, but what it looked like.
In each of those cases, picture messaging delivers an additional layer of the rich operator context that is integral to Relay’s platform.
The same logic drove our decision to bifurcate the app. An operator mid-shift shouldn’t be scrolling past user provisioning to reach the button that matters. Communicator holds what you need while the work is happening, while Admin holds what you need when you’re setting things up. Two jobs, two apps.
Where This Falls in our Roadmap
Every photo sent through Communicator becomes part of the operation’s own record of what their teams observe and call into Relay as they work. As Relay makes these insights more organized, searchable, and actionable, images will be a key part of filling that record of work so they can drive continuous improvements across their operations.
Voice built that record, and voice will keep building the majority of it. What changes is the resolution. Spoken exchanges become searchable transcripts. And now, when a picture is the clearest thing a person can contribute, that lands in the record too — in the same place, in the same format, under the same conversation. Picture messaging is a small form factor addition with an immediate operational lift, and it makes the record underneath everything else richer.
Getting Started
Relay Communicator and Relay Admin are available now for iOS and Android, and teams can start capturing images with their spoken communications today. Existing Relay for Frontline Teams users will automatically be updated to Communicator; channels, contacts, and settings come with you. Picture messaging is enabled by default for all users who have message history enabled.
