San Diego County Sheriff Uses AI on Non-Emergency Calls

Source Domain: www.govtech.com

Non-emergency calls coming into the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office (SDSO) are now being handled with an automated system powered by artificial intelligence, making it the latest local government to update how those calls are answered.

Washington state’s Tri-Cities area deployed Aurelian AI technology in mid-January to handle non-emergency calls coming into its Southeast Communications Center, which serves most agencies in Benton and Franklin counties. And Laredo Police Department will implement a new 911 platform this year that will respond to non-emergency situations via automated prompts.

San Diego County’s call processing center, staffed by 911 dispatchers, handles up to 400,000 non-emergency calls a year. Those calls are now being answered and routed by what the county called a “voice AI agent.” Emergency calls continue to be answered by trained humans.

“This system doesn’t touch 911 at all,” Capt. Nathan Rowley, a spokesperson for the SDSO communications center, said. “But it’s more like, someone wanted to call to report their mailbox got broken into last night. Obviously, that’s important to the person, but it’s not up to necessarily 911, ‘I need to talk to somebody right now.’”

The new call answering and routing system, announced last week, uses technology from Hyper. It went live March 6, following a year of onboarding and testing. It takes the place of a previous workflow, which had non-emergency calls routed through the 911 dispatch center, where they were often subject to delays due to dispatchers handling more pressing 911 calls. The dispatch center handles some 1,800 to 2,400 calls a day, Rowley said.

It was not uncommon for non-emergency calls to sit on hold for five to 10 minutes “waiting to talk to somebody,” he said, indicating the new system will both reduce dispatchers’ workload and improve response times. It can prioritize calls depending…

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