When in trouble, call the Emergency Hotline
A lot of countries have a public emergency response system that features a phone number to call. The US has two: 911 and 988. The latter is the National Mental Health Hotline. Being able to call 911 or 988 in an emergency and get a swift response is something most people expect. It, obviously, requires that there is someone at the other end of the line to pick up the call promptly. And that is easier said than done.
High job burn out
Being an emergency hotline dispatcher turns out to be a high stress job. The nature of the calls, the need for speed, the complexity of navigating available response resources, it all adds up.
Dispatchers are often asked to work longer hours to assure coverage and 12 to 16 hours shifts are not exceptional. Given the long hours and the nature of the calls it is, not surprisingly, a job with a very high turnover rate.
The average hourly pay for a 911 dispatcher in the United States is in the region of $22, translating to an average annual salary range of $45,000 to $50,000.
The combination of limited funding combined with the challenge of continuous recruitment, and training of operators, does make meeting stringent response targets a challenge.
AI to the rescue?
According to TechCrunch, there are at least 3 (new) companies that want to offer an AI powered agent that is inserted in the call center workflow. They plan to work something like this: It will answer each call and first off determine if this is an emergency. If so (or if in doubt), it (currently) hands the call off to human operators. For the non-emergency calls, the bot tries to drill down a bit further before handing the call off.
It turns out most 911 centers also handle non-emergency calls, including calls to local non-emergency phone numbers for many kinds of public assistance. The dispatchers obviously prioritize answering the urgent 911 calls, leading to long wait times for getting someone to pick up calls to the non-urgent numbers.
The bots are initially designed to reduce non-urgent wait times and possibly handle some of the non-urgent issues entirely without needing humans to respond. Thus making the load on emergency dispatcher lighter. Obviously these bots will have a high uptime and can work 24/7. Whether required training efforts for the bots are lower than for humans is yet to be seen.
Another task deemed suitable for AI is summarizing and documenting each call, thus relieving operators from what most see as a burden.
On the topic of AI replacing human workforces, one of the engineers offers: “We’re not really taking jobs away, we are replacing humans they want to hire, but can’t.”
It is happening
More than a dozen 911 dispatch centers use these bots, including Chattanooga, Tennessee, Kalamazoo, Michigan and Snohomish County, Washington. As for the 988 call dispatch, it appears at this time there are no bots answering your call.
Personally I do not recall having an AI bot answering a voice call, but I have enough experience with text based chat support to claim that the intelligence of a human respondent is, at this time, still preferable over a machine.