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.
And those ones would presumably be forwarded directly to the human staff. The point of this system is to filter out non-emergency calls.
Exactly how hell is the system going determine non and emergency calls. Didn’t know when you call 911 you have to make choices. So is it like calling customer service?
I thought point 911 was I got a human immediately on the phone that can help me.
Read the article.
Kehoe countered that the AI system would interact only with nonemergency callers and that emergency calls to 911 would be routed only to human dispatchers. In fact, she added, “on nonemergency calls, it might detect those elevated stress levels [for callers] and it will automatically default going to a human being as well.”
“There are a lot of safeguards,” Kehoe added, “to ensure that even with the tiniest bit of doubt, we don’t have someone just sitting on the phone and not getting help.”
The AI system will only reroute calls that it can determine are not emergency calls. The default will be to let the calls through to the human staff. It’s not going to be some sort of primitive “press 1 if you are currently on fire” menu system.
Very few people call the police non-emergency line because few people even know it and everyone knows 911
Seems like a good idea to have a mechanism to divert the non-emergency calls off of the 911 dispatchers, then.
How do you do that without screening calls through the AI. Now anyone calm will spend an extra minute begging a computer for help whist screaming people will spend an extra 20 seconds before being bumped up .
How long is it going to take to determine that its an emergency? How many are going to mis-identify as a non-emergency. Unless its in the middle of a large emergency where its bound to be overloaded by many callers it should always be a person that classifies this.
Those questions can be asked about humans who are making the decision too. How long does it take for a human to determine that it’s an emergency? How many are going to mis-identify as a non-emergency? There’s nothing unique about AI here.
We know how to run excellent human 911 service whereas automation in this area has always been frustrating garbage unfit to handle a cable tv outage.
Did you read the article? The reason they’re looking into this is because they’re not able to run an excellent human 911 service, they can’t hire enough people to handle the volume of non-emergency calls that are coming to the emergency line.
If anyone ever tells you they can’t hire enough of blank they are lying to you. People have been running excellent 911 service all over the country for longer than I’ve been alive maybe they should ask someone?
