I’ve worked as a first responder for a number of years, our county like many have an emergency number, 911, and a non-emergency number, i.e. 123-456-7890. We actually carry cards with the nom emergency number on it with us in the truck to pass out if a call was less than an emergency for people in our county to put into their phones for future use. We also are a smaller place and only ever have 2-3 dispatchers on at a time, so if the calls on the non-emergency line they got could be ‘auto-filled’ by the AI with the location, need, and everything and wasn’t tieing up a dispatcher that would be great. The main 911 number needs to ALWAYS be human answered. If the dispatcher makes the decision that it is non-emergent and transfers it over to the AI when they’re busy then great, but those first words you hear after you hit 911 needs to be human.
I design call centers for my job, we have an AI bot that can handle non emergency calls and what you said at the end is how we do it.
911 calls always start with a person, and the dispatcher can make the determination to transfer to the non-emergency bot. Y’all get too many calls that aren’t actual emergencies tbh.
Edit: I looked up Versaterm’s solution, CallTriage, and it’s important to note that the AI isn’t for 911 calls, it’s for non-emergency line calls only. The article is conflating the non-emergency calls with 911 calls for shock value.
Somebody is going to get killed from this.
For sure.
If they’ve got a problem with non-emergency callers dialing 911, surely it would be best to try and reduce that problem through other means (such as fining persistent inappropriate use of 911)
I don’t want to talk to a robot when I’m on the floor dying.
I think the non-emergency number should be heavily advertised. I have no idea what the local one for me is (if it even exists)
Promoting that the nunber exists as a actual thing people should use is good, yeah. :)
The actual number isn’t so important, though. If ever needed to call the non-emergency number I’d search it up, which fortunately I can do given I’ve got loads of time because it’s not an emergency.
I would bet there are large swaths of people that don’t know there is a nonemergency number to look up.
And in some locations (e.g. Atlanta, last time I checked), there is no non-emergency number–you call 911 regardless and the dispatcher directs the call.
There seems like a very easy solution here that doesn’t require AI.
Maybe they need to send something out to residents every six months or something, letting them know about the non-emergency number because I have this exact same issue. I’ve lived here for three years and have no idea if a non-emergency number even exists. It probably does. I just haven’t looked it up because I haven’t even thought about it.
What happens if you put “police your_city” in your favorite search engine? I tried it with my current city and the village where I grew up, and both led me to the phone number in reasonable time.
That does work (actually ‘non emergency city state’). But as another comment mentions, the public knowing it exists is more important than the number itself.
I thought some cases of bad 911 calling would be considering obstruction of justice, no?
Well…I’m anti-AI as it gets, and I don’t support this measure, but I would like to point out if you’re on the floor dying, that WOULD be an emergancy call.
And an LLM determining that accurately would be a dice roll.
A young person died in my youth crisis shelter because instead of getting 911, I was first redirected to a semi-literate moron working in a VOIP “call center”. Her Southern Alabama drawl was so severe I could not even recognize she was speaking English at first. This “call center” was also “experiencing higher than normal call volumes”.
Last week I was driving by a wooden apartment complex and I noticed that somebody’s unattended barbecue had gone poof and the balcony was burning. I called 911 and it took 4 minutes to get directed to the fire department.
I’m dumbfounded. I’d be furious if it took more than 20 seconds
I’m a dispatcher (not in the USA) and our managers start flipping out and running round like their heads are on fire if the wait time reaches 30 seconds. If there’s more than 3 calls in the emergency queue then they sit down and take them themselves (If you’ve ever worked in any call centre at all, emergency or not, you’ll know shit has to really hit the fan before management will consider doing this!)
Usually high queue time/numbers are just multiple calls for the same incident (think large RTC’s or very public assaults/stabbings right in the middle of a heavily trafficked city centre) so we can get that queue down very quickly, especially as 99% of the time any call after the initial one will simply be “we’re already aware and we’ve got crews en route, bye”.
AI is horrible at understanding context. remember when that lady was calling the police about her abuser and coded it to sound like a pizza order? yea I can see an AI hanging up
you have a link to that? interesting
Have you ever heard a 911 call? People don’t speak in complete sentences. Not everyone speaks English. They yell. They cry. They whisper. There’s background noise. Sometimes they need instructions on CPR or first aid. They may not know where they are. This is a recipe for disaster.
Great question! Here is a recipe for disaster:
1/2 Tsp Flour
1 Tbsp. Baking Powder
2 Cups Salt
4 Sticks Cold Butter
1/4 Cup White Chocolate Chips
6 Large Eggs (Scrambled)
Preheat oven to broil, spoon batter onto plastic baking sheet, and let bake overnight.
Customer support is annoying or whatever but this is horrifying. Several people will die because of this.
It says for non-emergency calls.
It might actually help with real emergency calls getting through faster.
One thing left unclear is how the determination is made about emergency versus non emergency.
If it’s a separate number, ok, seems clear cut enough.
If it’s human always answers and if it’s some bullshit they just click a button to punt to AI instead of just hanging up, ok.
If they are saying the AI answers and does the triage and hands off immediately to a human when “emergency detected”, then I could see how that promise could fail.
The important thing is that they can tune this to attempt to hold false negatives constant while decreasing false positive rate.
If someone calls 911 how on earth do you know its a non-emergency before speaking with someone?
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I know, and maybe it will, my faith is just very low.
Unless the AI fucks up and makes it sound like an emergency.
you’re too concerned about those “consequences” but have you considered that they get to fire people as well and save money?
did you think of all the taxes they’ll cut from the rich? no, you only think about yourself and what will happen to you in an emergency
Not to mention the rich people who’s pockets will get further lined with your tax dollars for their horseshit AI dispatcher!
you see, no downsides. it’s good for the economy…
and the economy is the only thing that matters.
/s
did you think of all the taxes they’ll cut from the rich? no, you only think about yourself and what will happen to you in an emergency
This is what it comes down to.
Rich people matter.
In our society they are the only ones that matter, unless they start to live in fear
Without reducing headcount, right? Right?
“I said this like 3 time already! Get me to the hospital for fucks sake, I’m gonna die in this situation if y’all don’t send someone soon…”
AI: “Understood, ‘Hostage Situation’. Sending a SWAT Team…”
Companies are already going away from such ideas…
AI is succeeding at exactly the things it’s supposed to: laundering accountability and responsibility. This measure will succeed in accomplishing that. Not everyone is a true believer, a lot of them just see the possibility of using “super intelligent AI” as a smoke screen to completely hide the need for statistical deaths to drive profitability/reduce costs and the responsibility of making those decisions while shutting out the average person’s ability to engage with any system beyond that AI smokescreen.
People will inevitably die as a result of this change. Call your representatives
People with protection detail and staff don’t need 911.
Oh you want to talk directly to a person? You need to subscribe to 911+. For only $4.99 a month, you get the following perks…
Just unlock it using your white voice.
You kid but voice recognition doesn’t handle accents as well wherein accents is defined as anything other than what you hear on the news.
Last century: whistling tones into the phone to get a free call
This century: faking an accent to get the police to respond
Wait, that sounds like the last century as well…
Contracted to a private corporation, of course.
Yeah, and who owns it? Or the stock at least?
I’ll put smart bets on Salt Lake City’s mayor.
Great. I always wanted a premium 911 subscription. If the lines are full it just disconnects somebody and connects me instead.
19.99/month for an operator with a decent microphone.
79.99/month for 2 operators at the same time.
Edit: I’m pretty sure the article is just going for shock value, and a lot of the commenters are getting baited. The City isn’t looking to make 911 calls go to an AI. It’s people who call the non-emergency line.
I design call centers (including for PubSec) for a living. We have a service offering for a non-emergency 911 bot. It’s honestly not even that new of a feature, it was around before the generative AI boom. Dispatch Centers are chronically understaffed, the job is hella stressful, there’s a lot of attrition and training new employees takes a lot of time because the calls can be sensitive or complex.
There is a pretty defined split in different cities (I mostly do state & local govt, not federal) in terms of who wants AI and who despises it. Some folks that lead dispatch groups are VERY adamant that everything needs to be a person, they often have big egos because their call center is “the most important” in any city.
And yeah, we’ve implemented the non emergency 911 bot for customers before. Our design starts with an agent though, and if the agent makes the determination that it’s not an emergency, they transfer the call over to the automated line. Btw, roughly half of all calls into a 911 center are actual “emergencies”. So they get a shit ton of calls they don’t need to, my guess is just because 911 is easy to remember and a non emergency line isn’t, I feel like we need another 3 digit line for “not life and death but still important” calls.
So if you are in trouble or held against your will and you say you’ll order pizza but sneK a call to 911 for help instead and pretend to order and give your address for delivery hoping an operator catches on… Doubt the AI will catch on.
Imagine your chatbot hallucinating as it tries to assist you in your life and death critical situation.
“To preform chest compression place both hand in the center of the subjects chest. Apply a rthymic steady pumping action until the subject wakes up. If the subject does not wake continue chest compressions until the subject wakes up. If the subject does not wake continue chest compressions until the subject wakes up. If the subject does not wake up seek medical advice, or call 911.”
“To apply a large bandage, peel back the red pull tab to expose the badage-aid, place wound over the white pad and wrap the wrap firmly around the skin. Finally adiminister 50mg of Goprelto to ease the pain.”
