911 looks to AI to filter out non-emergency calls

Utah’s Weber Area Dispatch 911, a public safety answering point, is using artificial intelligence to filter out harassing calls to its non-emergency line to ensure call takers are free to answer 911 calls.

Residents of Morgan and Weber counties, which the PSAP serves, were flooding the line after seeing a video by First Amendment auditors — people who record their often testy interactions with government workers.

“We had a video posted from one of our agencies, and we started getting flooded and adding just more stress to our call takers,” said Kevin Rose, director of Weber Area Dispatch 911. “We had an individual that called over 250 times in a two and a half-hour time period.”

The agency, which is testing a Motorola Solutions chatbot to handle non-emergency calls, applied it to this situation. Because the callers often use a blocked number or one they create for free online, the agency set up the AI to respond with an intercept message asking the caller to unblock the number and call again or dial 911 if they had an emergency.

“This had a tremendous impact on these calls,” Rose said. “People, if they’re calling from a blocked number, they’re not going to unblock their number. They don’t want us to know who they are.”

That use case was a bonus of the main issue the agency is looking to address: reducing the number of non-emergency calls dispatchers need to answer because the chatbot can handle them. Historically, the agency receives about 230,000 non-emergency calls each year and about 90,000 911 calls, Rose said.

“Every time a call taker is tied up on a non-emergency call, that’s taking away from answering 911 calls,” he said. “We looked at this as more of a workforce multiplier that’s going to allow us, hopefully, to free up our call takers, allow us to do more with the staffing we have.”

Rose said he hopes to go live with the AI in the next month or so. Ultimately, PSAPs statewide will use the technology to answer non-emergency calls through a partnership between the Utah Communications Authority and Motorola.

A need for modern technology at 911 centers is prevalent nationwide. “The public expects high-tech outcomes — like the ones they see on TV — without realizing that many of us are still working with infrastructure built in the 1970s,” said Lee Ann Magoski, in her first address as president of NENA, the 911 association, on June 25.

These decades-old systems are not equipped to handle today’s communication tools, including mobile devices. Yet at least 80% of 911 calls come from wireless devices in most areas, according to NENA.

For Morgan County 911 in Alabama, accidental calls from mobile devices are common and typically result in hang-ups. The agency’s policy requires dispatchers to follow up on every hang-up, but people are unlikely to answer calls from numbers they don’t know, said Samantha Sanders, a former dispatcher who is now a training and statistical analyst at the agency. 

That triggers a need to send first responders to the location the call came from for a wellness check. For an agency that serves about 130,000 residents and answers about 270,000 calls per year, 160,000 of which are to 911, dealing with abandoned calls can be time-consuming.

“A large amount of our tasks are just small tasks layered on top of one another — not necessarily anything that’s incredibly wild in itself as a single task, but once you start really layering on those things, it can become overwhelming fast once you have real-life situations on the other end of your technology,” Sanders said.

For help with managing abandoned calls, Morgan County 911 is using CentralSquare Technologies’ Vertex NG911 Call Handling system. It integrates with the company’s computer-aided dispatch that the agency already had in place. When someone hangs up, Vertex sends a text asking if there is an emergency. Motorola and CentralSquare have built their tools to support localities on Amazon Web Services.

“My favorite thing is, between our CAD and our Vertex, we don’t have the dial numbers once a call comes into our phone system,” Sanders said. “I feel like the amount of carpal tunnel that we’re cutting down on is insane…. [Plus,] how many times have we accidentally dialed the wrong phone number when we were calling somebody back? Now I don’t have to worry about that.”

If the person replies no, it clears the system, added Rob Farmer, interim national director of sales of Vertex NG911 Call Handling. If there is an emergency or no response, the system uses caller location query technology to determine where the call came from.

“We can pick you out within feet of where exactly you are,” Farmer said.

Modernizing 911 systems is great, Sanders said, but the key is making sure it’s usable and useful.

“When you have something that’s user-friendly, it makes it more likely that someone’s going to use it,” she said. “It’s not another task that we have to remember to use. It’s something that we just genuinely are automatically doing because it’s actually helpful and useful to us.”