The Brazos County Emergency Communications District has been periodically testing out a new artificial intelligence system to answer non-emergency 911 calls within the jurisdiction of the City of Bryan.
The Bryan location has used the AI system to answer calls from the public for about one hour so far. The plan is to turn on the AI answering service for brief periods over the next few weeks to smooth out kinks until it’s ready to be rolled out on a permanent basis.
Executive Director of the Brazos County Emergency Communications District Patrick Corley said that the system was developed in response to a high volume of calls to the dispatch center in Bryan.
“There are a few different call centers in Brazos County that answer calls,” Corley said. “We’re one of the locations here in Bryan. We answer about 50,000 911 calls on an annual basis, but we have about 200,000 non-emergency calls that we have to answer.”
Currently, the call center in Bryan is the only one in Brazos County that is developing a system to have AI answer non-emergency calls.
The non-emergency number is used to address many different issues including reporting inactive crimes, asking questions about city ordinances, filing complaints and more. Emergency and non-emergency calls all report to the same dispatch office, which can cause an overflow of non-emergency calls and overload the resources of the call center.
A telecommunicator at the Brazos County Emergency Communications District, Derek Faldik, has helped in the development process of the AI system. He explained that the AI allows human dispatchers to focus on priority emergency calls.
“We only have so many people that can answer 911 calls, so the more non-emergency calls we take, the less emergency capacity we have to take,” Faldik said.
The AI answering system, sourced through software company Prepared 911, can handle multiple calls at one time. It can also handle certain calls from beginning to end without human intervention, such as calls that ask simple questions or need to be transferred to other departments, according to Corley.
During the AI calls, a human is always monitoring the conversations and can immediately take over the call when words that may indicate an emergency are flagged.
The AI keeps transcripts of all calls so that it can gather information for a human dispatcher to follow up with a caller through text messaging after a call has ended. The AI can also listen to long stories that would otherwise take lots of time for a dispatcher to handle and create abbreviated notes for the dispatcher to look back on.
Faldik sees the AI system as something that helps out human dispatchers, not as something that is replacing human jobs.
“This is a super fast-growing community, and we need new ways to be able to expand our capabilities — and this is just one of those,” Faldik said.
Implementing the AI system will be a big cost savings, according to Corley.
“This is a very cost-efficient alternative to hiring more personnel, but I don’t see us ever reducing the number of people that we have currently working here based upon this AI,” Corley said. “Right now we’re just using it as a tool to help us give better customer service on those non-emergency issues.”
According to Corley, the initial cost of the AI system is $60,000, but it can handle the volume of calls of about eight or nine people that make close to $75,000 a year.
Corley said he wants to get the word out about the new system.
“We want the public to be aware that we’re doing this and understand that their call may be answered by an AI agent, and that the real-world component of this is very important in kind of getting it right in the long term,” Corley said. “We ask for their patience as we kind of work through those calls and learn from some of the real-world examples that are there and get this working out the way we want it to.”
