You talk as if they don’t already have customer facing implementations in effect,

Mind pointing to where I talk like that? I knew these have already been used in other customer-facing environments before ever commenting, so I'm happy to try to clarify, if needed.

and that those all suck and don’t work worth shit.

Got any sources from within the last year? I ask for the last year because "AI" (LLMs and the overall ecosystem) has become much more capable over the last ~year (maybe a little less, but close enough).

I've already seen some reports that are older and, unsurprisingly, terrible. Those earlier generations of LLMs definitely don't seem like they'd be up to the task – and some cities even had the balls to adopt this tech back in 2023 😬

This is an issue of not having enough 911 dispatchers

Correct, but it's not like they can just go to the 911 dispatcher store and pick up some dispatchers. The widespread shortages have been a problem since before transformer-based LLMs even existed.

This triage system is a mitigation, not a solution. It makes the bad problem less bad – not solved. Maybe someday there will be enough dispatchers. Unfortunately, we have not reached that "someday" yet.

due to the unwillingness to pay for them.

Source? Not saying you're wrong – I'm only aware of the shortage because I was friends with a dispatcher. I just never really looked into why there's a shortage, and now I'm curious.

The idea of putting in a chatbot, that can not even speed up diction

The goal is not to speed up diction – that would be more like "vertical scaling," or "scaling up." AI a bad choice for scaling that way, in most cases. AI is much better for "horizontal scaling," or "scaling out" – so like 20 bots concurrently answering 1 call each, not 1 bot trying to speed-run through 20 calls serially.

The fact is that these LLMs will (like in current deployments)

By "current deployments," do you mean current 911 deployments, or just things like customer service lines? There's a huge difference in product requirements between those two. If done the same, then yes, that would be an absolute disaster. That's not what this is though.

most of the time have to pass the call to a person, drastically increasing time on the phone before action is taken.

Where is this information from? I thought the problem was the surge of calls going to the call center to report the same thing (for example, people calling 911 when driving past a burning car). When that happens, the AI agents actually don't have to pass most calls to a person, because most calls are about the same emergency (e.g. the car fire example). Did I misunderstand this?

911 dispatch is not a telecom company and more time on the phone is more death, injury and suffering.

Exactly. This system reduces hold times by filtering out the spam about the car fire, freeing up some operators in the understaffed team to deal with more emergencies.

The AI system is obviously slower than a well-staffed team of operators who can handle the call volume surges, but faster than an understaffed team that has to get through the spam. Unfortunately, they're faced with the latter, so they found a way to at least mitigate the problem a bit.

Yeah it's definitely better to not answer all those calls

So... you do assume that you're the first to think of this problem, or...?

If you assume that your brain is somehow superior[^1] to everyone involved in the R&D, engineering, data analysts/QC, etc., then this may come as a surprise to you: You're not even the first Lemmy commenter to think of it.

Literally multiple people here already thought about that and commented before you did. They're not the first either; the author of the article herself even thought about it.

This idea is among the most obvious potential problems that come to mind within seconds or minutes of just hearing about the concept. It's not a dumb idea by any means (it's completely valid), it's just not a particularly smart or special one.

911 is not the first department in that city[^2] to use this tech, and that city isn't even the first to adopt it. It's silly to assume that such an easy-to-solve problem hasn't been addressed by now, or that it somehow has not yet happened in other deployments.

[^1]: To be clear: I make no assumptions that your brain is not superior to theirs either – I couldn't possibly know either way. AFAIK, I've never even met you nor them... But I think it would be a safe bet that you don't know either.

[^2]: BTW, have you heard cajun accents? There's no way this bridge hasn't already been crossed during their 311 trials.

https://infosec.pub/comment/23116617