Customer support is annoying or whatever but this is horrifying. Several people will die because of this.

It says for non-emergency calls.

It might actually help with real emergency calls getting through faster.

We have the best 911 dispatchers in the world, because of jail

Is this a good idea..

"To preform chest compression place both hand in the center of the subjects chest. Apply a rthymic steady pumping action until the subject wakes up. If the subject does not wake continue chest compressions until the subject wakes up. If the subject does not wake continue chest compressions until the subject wakes up. If the subject does not wake up seek medical advice, or call 911."

"To apply a large bandage, peel back the red pull tab to expose the badage-aid, place wound over the white pad and wrap the wrap firmly around the skin. Finally adiminister 50mg of Goprelto to ease the pain."

Just unlock it using your white voice.

It is exactly that. One may have a backtest. You'll see that real calls will be falsely detected.

What "modern AI" even means, you are arguing about taste of oysters with the people who have eaten them, unlike you.

Oh, of course you can't have a backtest with a proprietary centrally hosted model until it's deployed. Shit-shit-shit.

They have job openings that people simply aren’t applying for, it’s not a question of funding.

It is. Double the pay, see how many people there are. If still too few, double it again.

I'm certain it'll be less money wasted that on this bot done the lawful way, with proper compensations to victims and their families. We are not considering the situation where it's not.

They’re getting too many phone calls to handle and many of those phone calls should not be going to them in the first place. What should they do?

Hire more operators.

Contact centers have not been invented yesterday, it's just plain bullshit this simple task is somehow hard today, when it has already been simplified far beyond what people in year 1977 dreamed about.

It's the actual job of the government, BTW, and not playing Caesar with real armies or playing Master of Orion with real systems.

And next you lose them

Companies are already going away from such ideas..

One thing left unclear is how the determination is made about emergency versus non emergency.

If it's a separate number, ok, seems clear cut enough.

If it's human always answers and if it's some bullshit they just click a button to punt to AI instead of just hanging up, ok.

If they are saying the AI answers and does the triage and hands off immediately to a human when "emergency detected", then I could see how that promise could fail.

It's called capitalism. If you can't hire anyone, maybe the pay sucks.

And what examples of ai makes you think that it will be 100% accurate because that's what is needed in this situation. Not a single one of those calls can be lost in the shuffle.

The important thing is that they can tune this to attempt to hold false negatives constant while decreasing false positive rate.

A lot depends on the implementation rather than the idea itself. I've read plenty of stories of people stuck on hold with 9-1-1 - including deaths - as well as cases where they've been hung up on by shitty operators.

An AI system might be able to do some basic triage to prioritize calls for the human operators and actually result in faster access/response and saved lives. It might also be able to do things like transcribing information such as addresses or location for responders.
If the AI is planned to be a replacement for humans rather than an augmentation though, lives will likely be lost

I know, and maybe it will, my faith is just very low.

The opposite is extremely common too. People get on the phone and instantly go into raw panic mode and yell about 500 words at you before you've even had a chance to read your greeting. After putting down some choice words to control them a bit, you find out they found a bag of weed in their teenager's bag or their neighbour's playing music too loud.

I'm a dispatcher (not in the USA) and our managers start flipping out and running round like their heads are on fire if the wait time reaches 30 seconds. If there's more than 3 calls in the emergency queue then they sit down and take them themselves (If you've ever worked in any call centre at all, emergency or not, you'll know shit has to really hit the fan before management will consider doing this!)

Usually high queue time/numbers are just multiple calls for the same incident (think large RTC's or very public assaults/stabbings right in the middle of a heavily trafficked city centre) so we can get that queue down very quickly, especially as 99% of the time any call after the initial one will simply be "we're already aware and we've got crews en route, bye".

When the operator identifies the call as a non-emergency (which takes an absolute maximum of 2 minutes, even for very complicated calls), they simply say "please call the non-emergency line on XXX, thanks, bye". Why is the AI required?

I agree that people shouldn't be calling the emergency line with rubbish, but unfortunately they do, because the non-emergency line isn't as well publicized and even if they do know about it people think that "non-emergency" means "we can't be bothered dealing with it" and so calling the emergency line somehow means their issue will be taken more seriously.

Where I work we take both non and emergency calls, and have a separate number for each. The phone system we use will make sure the emergency calls come through first, so it's not uncommon to have zero emergency calls queueing while the non-emergency queue sits at 10-20 minutes (just like any other call centre, we have the boards up on the wall showing the stats).

It seems like this AI thing is trying to solve the problem of people calling the emergency number for a call that doesn't need an emergency response, which is super common. Either people don't know about the non-emergency line, or they think the non-emergency line is for other people and calling the emergency line will get their issue sorted faster. The first kind are usually very apologetic when you ask them to call the non-emergency, the second kind will argue with you and we're instructed to just hang up on them after repeating the instruction to keep the emergency queue free.

The thing is, anyone with half a brain can identify a non-emergency call within max 2 minutes. It's probably the easiest part of the whole job. But it definitely requires a human, because people will call up shouting and screaming like they're mid-way through getting stabbed, when really they're just a grumpy old fuck who's neighbours are playing rap music. And on the flip side, plenty of people are able to make a full-on emergency call in an almost spookily calm tone, and even more so if they're not directly involved (Common example is a teacher or social worker calling something in a child's disclosed to them about their parents). So being able to read between the lines in a way humans are very good at, but robots are not, is obviously super important.