She is abruptly awakened by the sound of a breaking window. In her groggy state, it takes her a few seconds to wake up. Michelle remembers her husband is working the late shift tonight and won’t be home until morning. She thinks she hears footsteps downstairs but isn’t quite sure. Her 8- and 11-year-old children are sleeping in their bedrooms at the opposite end of the hall. Her heart pounding, she makes her way to their rooms. As she dials 911, and the operator answers, she’s not sure if she’s talking to a person or a machine. She can’t tell. She doesn’t care. She just needs help.

The public safety dispatch center that receives the 911 call is a stark contrast to others. Normally, there would be dispatchers and call takers sitting at consoles, people moving, papers being shuffled, and murmured conversations. Here is just eerie silence., accompanied by blinking green, red, and yellow lights. Even the most careful listener will hear only the sounds of the cooling fans in this climate-controlled room. This is the communications center of the future, where computers, not humans, are taking emergency calls from the public.

The word “chatbot” is a generic term used to describe artificial intelligence computer programs that simulate conversation through voice or text. Many are familiar with such chatbots as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Ok Google. They are an emerging technology that is rapidly influencing everyday life.¹ In the future, they will likely become an integral part of public safety communication centers and will directly enhance public safety and increase efficiency while decreasing staffing needs and personnel costs.

Chatbots Fill Our Future Workforce

In September 2016, a Massachusetts-based research firm predicted that automation would replace 6 percent of U.S. jobs in the next five years.² Others see humans using and working with artificial intelligence to enhance efficiency. North Carolina’s Innovation Center Director Eric Ellis sees a future in which chatbots are helping workers as opposed to replacing them.³ Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said,

Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence. It’s mostly about the bandwidth, the speed of the connection between your brain and the digital version of yourself, particularly output. ⁴

He explained that computers can communicate at “a trillion bits per second,” while humans, through typing, can do about 10 bits per second. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, believes Microsoft and its competitors should refrain from artificial intelligence systems that replace people instead of maximizing their time. “The fundamental need of every person is to be able to use their time more effectively, not to say, ‘let us replace you,’” Nadella said in an interview at the DLD conference in Munich.⁵ Yet, for future police dispatch centers, it just may be more affordable, efficient, and effective to have chatbots replace people

911 Nationwide Data

Public safety dispatch centers process an estimated 240 million 911 calls in the United States each year.⁶ These calls are answered at more than 9,000 public safety call centers located throughout the United States. The system is often stressed to the point that people needing emergency services are put on hold. This can be especially true during the most critical of incidents, such as large-scale mass casualty events, due to sheer call volume.

Chatbots are infinitely scalable. They can theoretically answer an unlimited number of simultaneous phone calls

In their current form, the number of human operators determines the number of calls a dispatch center can handle at any given moment. If the number of calls exceeds the number of operators, callers are placed on hold. During significant events, call centers are flooded with emergency calls. Many callers are just witnesses attempting to report what they’ve seen. Many simply hang up if their call is not answered quickly. In contrast, chatbots are infinitely scalable. They can theoretically answer an unlimited number of simultaneous phone calls because their capacity is limited only by their computing power.⁷

Budget Constraints Reduce Dispatch Staffing

Budgets continue to be a significant concern for most cities in the United States. In many areas, especially during difficult economic periods, government staffing—including public safety call center personnel—is decreased in order to reduce budget shortfalls. However, as the number of calls public safety receives continues to increase, it’s unfeasible to reduce staffing. Chatbots offer a solution to reduce human staffing in public safety dispatch centers.

Chatbots Respond to Customers Quickly and Efficiently

Private sector companies in the telemarketing and customer service industries have been using chatbots to communicate with customers in more efficient ways. As these technologies advance and improve, their incorporation into public safety will have significant implications.

As the field of artificial intelligence continues to expand, these sophisticated chatbots will become more indistinguishable from humans.

Even as recently as the mid-2000s, when communicating with a chatbot, a person needed to use exact words or phrases for it to understand. Today’s sophisticated chatbots use speech analysis and language processing to interpret long, complex strings of words. Current speech analysis technology goes far beyond just understanding what people are saying, but also what they mean. The technology can analyze tone, vocabulary, and even silences to determine emotion. Combined with analytics, some software can even detect when a caller is getting frustrated.⁸ With these now available tools, many companies have begun using chatbots for customer service tasks to cut call center costs. These chatbots use artificial intelligence technology to hold a conversation with a person and use a combination of machine learning and language processing to predict with more than 90 percent accuracy what they need.⁹ As the field of artificial intelligence continues to expand, these sophisticated chatbots will become more indistinguishable from humans.

Soon a Police Chatbot Will Respond to Your Call for Help

Any implementation of automated public safety attendants into the public safety dispatch space should be gradual. Although when mature, the technology will likely be able to handle any situation, including emergency 911 calls and eventually dispatching, the technology should first be used to handle incoming non-emergency calls. Most of the calls a public safety dispatch center receives are not 911 calls, nor are they even emergencies. For example, in 2016, a Southern California police department serving a population of approximately 100,000 residents processed 191,492 phone calls, but only 55,988 were 911 calls. Many of those 911 calls were not emergency situations. Even if chatbots were delegated only to answering non-emergency calls, it would greatly reduce the workload of call takers and allow them to focus on higher priority work. Although it is difficult to estimate the potential cost savings of using chatbots specifically for public safety call centers, a government think tank in the United Kingdom estimated that chatbots could eliminate up to 90 percent of government administrative jobs.¹⁰ A 90 percent reduction in the number of call takers a communication center requires would be quite significant.

The Emerging Reality

The use of chatbots in public safety dispatch centers offers the possibilities of increased efficiency, as well as significant personnel cost savings. Matt Swanson, a technology advisor for several Silicon Valley companies, believes “chatbots are poised to fundamentally change the way humans interact with machines within a five-year horizon.”¹¹ As the use of chatbots in society continues to increase and they become cheaper, more intelligent, more accurate, and more accepted by people, their integration into public safety is inevitable.

Notes:

¹ Ben Rossi, “5 Ways Bots Will Impact Our Lives in 2018,” Information Age, February 01, 2018.

² Mirren Gidda, “Jobs on the Line: New Technology Could Replace Millions of Call Center Workers in the Philippines,” Newsweek, September 29, 2016.

³ Justine Brown “Chatbots Debut in North Carolina, Allow IT Personnel to Focus on Strategic Tasks,” Government Technology, October 12, 2016.

⁴ Arjun Kharpal, “Elon Musk: Humans Must Merge with Machines or Become Irrelevant in AI Age,” CNBC, February 13, 2017.

⁵ Aaron Ricadela, “Microsoft’s Nadella Warns Against ‘Hubris’ Amid AI Growth,” Bloomberg, January 16, 2017.

⁶ NENA, “9-1-1 Statistics”; Michael Harthorne, “Infant Dies After 911 Put Sitter on Hold for 31 Minutes,” Newser, March 15, 2017.

⁷ Kevin Flynn, “20% Increase in 911 Calls Is Seen As a Result of Cellular Phone Use,” The New York Times, May 01, 2001.

 ⁸ Bernard Marr, “How Analytics, Big Data and AI Are Changing Call Centers Forever,” Forbes, September 06, 2016.

⁹ Amy King, “Is Your Call Center Ready for Chatbots?” Talkdesk, October 5, 2016.

¹⁰ Alexander Hitchcock, Kate Laycock, and Emilie Sundorph, Work in Progress. Towards a Leaner, Smarter Public-Sector Workforce (London, UK: Reform Research Trust, 2017).

¹¹ Matt Swanson and Silicon Valley Software Group, “The 200 Billion Dollar Chatbot Disruption,” VentureBeat, May 01, 2016.