New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human

:sigh: Yet again, nobody reads the fucking article and it is VERY obvious from most of the comments. If you can’t be bothered, then don’t fucking comment.

If you had READ the article: They’re answering with the AI saying like “Are you calling about X?” If the callers says no, they are transferred to a human. If they ARE calling about an incident, then they can get updates and information about it.

Now, I grant that this is still not perfect, but the stated goal is humans spending less time talking to people reporting an incident already reported so they can actually talk to people needing help faster.

Assuming that works out, this is actually a good idea and an improvement.

Now, if you wanna be cynical about it, fine. But just read the damn article and be cynical about what’s actually happening, not about what you think from the headline, or all you end up looking like an ass.

I came into the comments to have a good discussion on the issue. I should have known better. I’m so irritated by the majority of comments that I lost interested in the topic itself, even though there’s at least one ofther comment I saw also pointing out what the article says. But no, the majority of you can’t be bothered, so screw this. And you bitch about reddit.

Holy shit, I’m actually surprised how bad the rest of the comments are… And the volume of them!

I’ll try to TL;DR it for the lemmings, with formatting that is (hopefully) easy to understand for even the most rotten of brains.

TL;DR

The problem

• Too many people are all calling 911 about the same emergency.

I’ll use this example scenario below: People keep driving past a burning car on a busy road, and many of them call 911. (This will continue to happen until an emergency responder arrives.)

Before implementing this tech

• 911 operators are all busy answering calls that are all reporting the same car fire
• Long 911 hold time for someone with an emergency unrelated to the car fire

After implementing this tech

Bot: "Are you calling about the car fire on Seventh Street?"

• If caller answers “yes”:
  • AI bot tells them that responders have already been dispatched
• If caller answers anything other than “yes”:
  • Transfer to the next available human dispatcher
  • Greatly reduced hold time thanks to automated triage

If the critical failure point is accurately classifying “yes” or “not yes,” even the dumbest^1 models could handle that – and I doubt they use the dumbest models for 911 triage.

Even if it’s not 100% perfect every time, this still sounds like a net positive.

• If caller answers “yes”:
• AI bot tells them that responders have already >been dispatched

So you’re gating whether or not a caller in an emergency gets to speak to a human based on the audio recognition of a robot?

Easy enough to make it so that if the bot doesn’t hear a yes or a no clearly it defaults to forwarding the call, but what happens when a person says no and the bot “hears” yes?

I believe I touched on that in my last sentence, but I can elaborate:

That will probably happen – neural networks are approximation algorithms. It’s a question of how often that happens.

What percentage of the calls get misclassified? And what’s the threshold percentage that would be needed for the triage bot to be a net positive?

It sounds like they have an idea of these numbers based on data collected from the non-emergency line, so it’s not like they’re just blindly jumping into this.

EDIT: I just realized that I did not actually answer your question of “what happens”…

I imagine the caller would just interrupt the AI’s answer (e.g. “No not that,” “HELP,” “Give me a human,” “FUCK!” etc.)? That seems like the natural thing to do.

To be clear: I don’t know anyone at Carbyne or OPCD. I can only offer speculation.

I don’t think there’s any net positive that would account for not answering an emergency call at all.

Can you really justify someone not being able to reach help at all in place of everyone being able to reach it albeit slower?

As a lifelong first responder, I couldn’t get behind something like this at all.

:sigh: Okay, I’ll try to break it down even more…

I don’t think there’s any net positive that would account for not answering an emergency call at all.

Exactly. That’s what they want to solve.

TL;DR: Even when callers reach the triage bot, they can still reach a human much faster than without the triage bot.

Comparing again:

• WITHOUT the triage tech:

  • NOBODY (or nothing) answers the call for a long while, because the caller is stuck in a very long queue of calls waiting to tell them about the same emergency

• WITH the triage tech:

  • AI bot answers the call instantly and probably knows how to help because the call is probably about the same emergency that 95% of the other calls are about
    • so 95% less spam for the human operators to get through
  • If the call is NOT about the same thing as the others, the caller can simply say that (i.e., “no”), and they reach a human within, say, 5-10 seconds because the operators aren’t busy trying to get through the spam calls

They chose this tech because it has already proven to be a net positive on their non-emergency line.

None of that applies if a caller just can’t get through at all because the bot mistook “no” for “yes”