New Orleans Is Latest to Answer Nonemergency Calls With AI

(TNS) — Within months, New Orleans’ 311 callers may reach an artificial intelligence agent instead of a human operator.

The AI agent has been trained on the last three years’ worth of 311 calls. It’s been programmed to sound “customer service-centric, polite,” said Karl Fasold, executive director of the Orleans Parish Communications District. And it knows how to pronounce Tchoupitoulas.

“It won’t be able to generate tickets (for service requests). It will provide information. But 50% of our 311 calls are simply providing information,” said Fasold, who has a degree in computer science and served as the district’s director of technology before being appointed to its top role in 2023.

A bigger shift has already happened. Since 2023, AI agents have been answering and triaging certain 911 calls in New Orleans.

The communications district was among the first in the nation to adopt AI-assisted 911 call triaging. Carbyne, a company that makes software for emergency call centers, had recently upgraded the district’s legacy 911 system to a cloud-native 911 product and was working on an AI agent.

“I was intrigued by the idea,” said Fasold, whose staff often became overwhelmed with surges of calls. He worked with Carbyne to analyze where the spikes were coming from.

“We identified a repeated pattern coming from the data,” said Alex Dizengof, chief technology officer and cofounder of Carbyne. “The pattern was every morning and evening during rush hour, there would be an accident, and hundreds of callers called in about the same thing.”

The result was a long queue that buried critical 911 calls.

“If you’re calling about a heart attack, you go to the back of the queue,” Dizengof said. “The queue is blind. Call takers aren’t able to prioritize the calls.”

But AI agents could. The Carbyne system integrated the computer-aided dispatch system used by first responders, so AI agents “know where all the auto accident…

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