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.
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
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
“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…”
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.
Without reducing headcount, right? Right?
People will inevitably die as a result of this change. Call your representatives
People with protection detail and staff don’t need 911.
Companies are already going away from such ideas…
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…
“To better assist you please describe the nature of your emergency… Let’s try this again. To better assist…”
Meanwhile grandma is stroking out and you can’t get passed the first branch in a call tree
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.”
I wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars they’ve set aside for settlements.
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.
Is this a good idea…
no
maybe to have in cases where they are under to much load, such as a massive emergency where they get way more calls than they can handle.
as a backup only.
but even then it’ll encourage them to have less personnel.
never had a conversation that didn’t hallucinate every now and then
A lot depends on the implementation rather than the idea itself. I’ve read plenty of stories of people stuck on hold with 9-1-1 - including deaths - as well as cases where they’ve been hung up on by shitty operators.
An AI system might be able to do some basic triage to prioritize calls for the human operators and actually result in faster access/response and saved lives. It might also be able to do things like transcribing information such as addresses or location for responders. If the AI is planned to be a replacement for humans rather than an augmentation though, lives will likely be lost
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.
