you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 4 points 5 days ago (2 children)

AI is absolutely not needed for this, and is only a liability.

They could say "press 1 if you are calling about X" or even "if you are calling about X, we are already aware of it. If not, you will be transferred to an operator in a moment".

An automated system like this is easy to implement, easy to audit, and will fail in expected and managable ways.
AI is nondeterministic, and will fail randomly in very unexpected ways.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

    I (mostly) agree. I was just TL;DR'ing it for the shocking number of people who are commenting about things that are already addressed in the article that they didn't bother reading.

    I hesitate to agree with "absolutely" though. I don't know enough about their situation to confidently have an opinion that strong[^1].

    AI can be useful for some dynamic situations – and 911 call centers can get pretty "dynamic" at times.

    Imagine a busy 911 call center. Clippy appears (wearing a firefighter uniform) on an operator's screen with a message like "The last 4 calls were about the same car fire. There are currently 9 calls in the queue. Want me to triage?" It would take WAY less time for a busy operator to click "Yes" than it would to step away and go record some voice message, configure some automated thing, etc.

    [^1]: I only ever knew one dispatcher personally, and even in her town (much lower population than New Orleans'), they were overworked.

  • source
  • parent
  • I think this could be updated by a single person for multiple developing situations up to 10 at a single time (which is unlikely for mass reports imo, I have no basis for this assumption however). Rather than needing an AI agent to update automatically

  • source
  • parent