New Orleans becomes first major US city to use AI for 911 calls: The worst idea you could think of
New Orleans has become the first city in the US to use artificial intelligence to answer emergency 911 calls — but critics warn it could have deadly consequences.The Orleans Parish Communication District — which gets over a thousand emergency dials a day, in what is among the highest volume of calls in the country — is routing the 911 calls to an AI agent that decides which ones get bumped to human dispatchers and which get handled by the bot itself, according the Shreveport Times.“I was a 911 dispatcher for 11 years and this is the worst idea you could possibly think of,” warned an online critic using the name Boxy, who claimed to be a first responder.The new tool, known as AI Emergency Call Triage, was first deployed in Louisiana’s largest city in late July after being tested on its 311 hotline.The triage bot analyzes calls to prioritize which emergencies should be handled by humans, while it handles repeat calls or low-priority ones to avoid inundating dispatchers, the Times explained.OPCD Executive Director Karl Fasold, however, emphasized that the AI is not replacing human dispatchers, and said the system will mainly be used when the caller is within roughly 200 meters of a crash that has already been reported and when all human call-takers are busy, according to local CBS News affiliate WWL-TV.
Critics, nonetheless, fear it could have deadly consequences. “You have scenarios where the person can’t speak well [or have strong accents] — or if they’re in a domestic situation and they pretend to call for pizza or something — you have to be able to determine how someone feels or pick up on what they aren’t saying,” said Boxy, who had a picture of himself in a first responder uniform in his profile.“You need a person.”New Orleans appears to be the first major municipality in the country to allow AI to actually answer emergency calls.However, others — such as Atlanta and Seattle — have also integrated AI into their 911 systems in l...