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New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human (www.shreveporttimes.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/usa@lemmy.ml
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[–] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)

This news was barely news a few months ago when it was first reported.

This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it's no, then the callers are transferred to a human.

This combats multitudes of calls piling up and taking longer time to potentially answer an emergency call. The OPCD said the AI will not be used to handle emergency calls, only to direct such calls to a human dispatcher.

Its a strech to even call this “AI”

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    I work in 911 dispatch. Of all of the dumb shit I get calls about, these are hardly the things that are holding up our queue.

    It happens, if there's, for example, a bad accident on a highway during rush hour, we very well might get 100 people calling about it.

    But those calls take like 10 seconds to handle.

    Caller: Hi, I'm on I69 and...

    Me: are you calling about the accident near mile 420 westbound?

    Caller: yes I am

    Me: Police have already been dispatched. We're you involved in the accident or did you see it happen?

    Caller: no, I was just driving past, I just wanted to make sure someone had called

    Me: thank you for checking in, have a nice day click

    End of call.

    And sometimes, we do need/want more information about an accident (for example,) and we need to see if we can get that from the caller. "Can you tell if anyone is hurt" so we can send an ambulance if we need to. "Are they blocking traffic?" Because that ups the urgency a bit because it might cause more accidents. "Can you tell if everyone was out of the car?" Because the previous callers were saying it was on fire but couldn't tell if they got out. Etc.

    And I don't like the idea of an AI making the call for me whether more questions need to be asked or not, and sometimes the situation changes and we need to know and I feel like a lot of people wouldn't stay on the line for us to figure out if that's the case if they get an AI telling them that we're already aware.

    --

    Pretty much the one thing I'd like to see automated, and it really doesn't need to be AI powered, is calling back hang-ups. We do actually waste a lot of time calling back people who butt-dialed us, and I do feel like an automated call-back with a message like "This is an automated call from 911, we just received a hang up call from this number, please do not hang up, police may have already been dispatched to the location provided by your phone. If you dialed by mistake, please press 1 now and we will disregard your call. If you do need police, fire, or medical assistance, press 2 or stay on the line and your call will be answered by our next available call-taker, si hablas Espanol, pulsa 3..."

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