this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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:sigh: Yet again, nobody reads the fucking article and it is VERY obvious from most of the comments. If you can't be bothered, then don't fucking comment.
If you had READ the article: They're answering with the AI saying like "Are you calling about X?" If the callers says no, they are transferred to a human. If they ARE calling about an incident, then they can get updates and information about it.
Now, I grant that this is still not perfect, but the stated goal is humans spending less time talking to people reporting an incident already reported so they can actually talk to people needing help faster.
Assuming that works out, this is actually a good idea and an improvement.
Now, if you wanna be cynical about it, fine. But just read the damn article and be cynical about what's actually happening, not about what you think from the headline, or all you end up looking like an ass.
I came into the comments to have a good discussion on the issue. I should have known better. I'm so irritated by the majority of comments that I lost interested in the topic itself, even though there's at least one ofther comment I saw also pointing out what the article says. But no, the majority of you can't be bothered, so screw this. And you bitch about reddit.
You don't need "ai" for this though. IVRs have been doing this for literal decades. Your average dialup ISP had a standard option for times of outages ffs.
Still, it’s a sloppy headline designed for clicks or thumbs up. It would be more accurate if it was “AI is to initially screen calls….”
sensationalized headlines aren't new. If anything they're more important now than ever
Yeah, its not handling "my grandma is dying pls send emt" calls, but more "The concert hall is on fire" call #450.
That being said, I disagree with most applications of AI that prevent human interaction. Just because im the 40th person calling about a situation doesnt mean my call is useless, it means i might have new information on an evolving situation.
Holy shit, I'm actually surprised how bad the rest of the comments are... And the volume of them!
I'll try to TL;DR it for the lemmings, with formatting that is (hopefully) easy to understand for even the most rotten of brains.
TL;DR
The problem
I'll use this example scenario below: People keep driving past a burning car on a busy road, and many of them call 911. (This will continue to happen until an emergency responder arrives.)
Before implementing this tech
After implementing this tech
If the critical failure point is accurately classifying "yes" or "not yes," even the dumbest^1 models could handle that – and I doubt they use the dumbest models for 911 triage.
Even if it's not 100% perfect every time, this still sounds like a net positive.
So you’re gating whether or not a caller in an emergency gets to speak to a human based on the audio recognition of a robot?
Easy enough to make it so that if the bot doesn’t hear a yes or a no clearly it defaults to forwarding the call, but what happens when a person says no and the bot “hears” yes?
I believe I touched on that in my last sentence, but I can elaborate:
That will probably happen – neural networks are approximation algorithms. It's a question of how often that happens.
What percentage of the calls get misclassified? And what's the threshold percentage that would be needed for the triage bot to be a net positive?
It sounds like they have an idea of these numbers based on data collected from the non-emergency line, so it's not like they're just blindly jumping into this.
EDIT: I just realized that I did not actually answer your question of "what happens"...
I imagine the caller would just interrupt the AI's answer (e.g. "No not that," "HELP," "Give me a human," "FUCK!" etc.)? That seems like the natural thing to do.
To be clear: I don't know anyone at Carbyne or OPCD. I can only offer speculation.
I don’t think there’s any net positive that would account for not answering an emergency call at all.
Can you really justify someone not being able to reach help at all in place of everyone being able to reach it albeit slower?
As a lifelong first responder, I couldn’t get behind something like this at all.
:sigh: Okay, I'll try to break it down even more...
Exactly. That's what they want to solve.
TL;DR: Even when callers reach the triage bot, they can still reach a human much faster than without the triage bot.
Comparing again:
WITHOUT the triage tech:
WITH the triage tech:
They chose this tech because it has already proven to be a net positive on their non-emergency line.
None of that applies if a caller just can’t get through at all because the bot mistook “no” for “yes”
Do you honestly think that nobody has thought about that and solved that problem already? Even with all the engineers involved, and after all the real-world testing, you're the first to have considered that scenario?
Even consumer-grade products like ChatGPT can be interrupted while talking. We're talking about an AI implementation, not some rigid set of
if...elsestatements.You talk as if they don't already have customer facing implementations in effect, and that those all suck and don't work worth shit. You also seem to think the "engineers" involved are custom doing anything and not just some sales person slapping a half baked product on every problem. When you get paid per deployed program, everything looks like a problem to solve with said program.
This is an issue of not having enough 911 dispatchers, due to the unwillingness to pay for them. The idea of putting in a chatbot, that can not even speed up diction let alone have any empathy is just wildly inappropriate in this situation. The fact is that these LLMs will (like in current deployments) most of the time have to pass the call to a person, drastically increasing time on the phone before action is taken. This is already seen in almost all LLM supported call centers, but a 911 dispatch is not a telecom company and more time on the phone is more death, injury and suffering.
That is the thought process of a child. If your defense of something with obvious issues is “Well I’m sure they know what they’re doing, because if they didn’t it would be bad”, I have some really, really bad news for you about the world.
If this was thought through by a capable adult, it would’t be implemented at all. The very fact that this solution is on the table is proof of the breakdown of rational thought. Or more likely, greased palms.
Your blind appeal to authority would hold more water if we haven’t already seen national adoption of AI products in emergency services that that have catastrophically failed to perform their basic functions, leading to real world harm. Audits of Flock cameras deployed in several cities found an error rate ranging from 33-70%. People are being arrested for things they didn’t do because the AI doesn’t work and nobody cares. People are being stalked because nobody thought of basic security controls.
Even worse, we’re talking about an AI implementation of if…else statements. Regular if else statements are consistent. As soon as you throw AI into the mix they become unpredictable. You introduce a failure mode that didn’t exist before that can and will have real consequences.
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.
As someone who worked in the industry, your trust is wildly misplaced. I guarantee someone has already said internally this will not work and was shushed by a sales manager.
And as far as "I am sure they tested accents" goes? HA they likely noted it was a mess and moved on. You think the goal is a functioning system, but it is not it is just to make the sale.
Why does it have to be AI? Why can't it be "press 1 for the highway car fire on 42, press 2 to be transferred to an operator"? Surely that's much less likely to fail?
https://infosec.pub/comment/23116617
That doesn't answer my question at all?
Ah, right, I suppose it's contextual. You would also have to read the comment that it's responding to. To summarize: it might not have to be AI.
However, 911 is a bit too dynamic for your solution to be viable as-is. For example, "Hey Siri/Google, I can't move my hands. Call 911."
Your idea is probably a decent starting point for brainstorming a solution — it just needs more thought, research, testing, etc. And I wouldn't be surprised if a similar product already exists. (I'd actually be surprised if it doesn't already exist.)
I believe the argument is that the probability of misclassifying an arbitrary segment of speech as the very particular answer “yes” is sufficiently low (with reasonably trained, current models) that we may ignore it under practical circumstances.
I find the non-zero probability of misclassifying in a little disquieting, but I suppose one way of looking at it is that this will probably increase the expected value of lives saved; the very probable case (calls are correctly filtered and a smaller proportion is passed through, allowing operators to respond to more new emergencies) may save a lot of lives, whereas the very improbable case (something that is not “yes” is misclassified as such) may endanger a few.
One thing that would worry me about just looking at expected values is the possibility of bias against a particular group of people or emergency type, but to me that seems unlikely in this case.
Edit: it also just occurred to me that if you are woefully unfortunate, you can probably just call again if you accept the assumption that there is a high probability the answer is yes given the model classified it as such. It might be more or less random chance?
Yeah I just don’t buy that there is a case where any “net gain” here is justified. These are people’s lives that you’re playing with by reducing them to what amounts to a balance sheet in the name of saving money.
The idea that you would create the possibility of denying someone emergency care that didn’t exist before, no matter how improbable (probably not even that improbable, given the propensity even the most advanced frontier AI models have for getting things wrong or hallucinating entirely despite simple instructions) just to save 10-15 seconds on average for other callers is not only absurd on its face, but morally bankrupt. You can personally ignore it because you don’t live there and it’s not the lives of you or your family at stake. I think those who this system could fail would not be able to ignore a flaw like that when it happens to them, and the idea that their peril was “highly improbable” will not be of much comfort to them.
The problem is that there are staffing shortages. The solution is hiring more staff. Trying to cheat our way out by implementing a system prone to unmitigatable flaws that could have life-altering or even life ending consequences isn’t a solution, it’s dystopian.
how long could the queue be? If someone can't wait 60 seconds for the queue, but can take the 8 seconds to ask if it's about X incident. I do imagine it will be smart enough to check their approximate location before giving the prompt
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.
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
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.
I have to agree with you one hundred, /u/percent
:)
This is Lemmy and it says AI. Expect nobody to read and for panties to twist so hard their legs come off.
As I replied to a similar comment, in fairness - my panties came off as well. hehe (but for a valid reason, dammit! :slams fist on desk:)
I increasingly hate Lemmy for the way this seems to constantly happen on this topic and others. It's like users are caricatures of opinions instead of people. Which, hey, maybe that's prescient.
I think it's an internet thing, not a Lemmy thing, to be honest.
I'm a voracious reader. I'm on Lemmy and basically not on reddit anymore because I want to have good discussions. And sometimes the discussions are pretty decent, but things like this put me off a bit.
It's still a pretty decent platform overall. Although that might say more about the state of the internet at large than it does say good things about Lemmy. heh. But I'm still here. :)
It's a human thing, above all else. If they wanted logical reasonable discussion, they should talk to robots. Except that's the thing they hate
If I talk to robots, I get hallucinations. And mostly true things, but it's hard to trust when they get it wrong a lot of the time. heh.
But yeah, it's also human nature. :)
So, Lemmy really seems to love these two things:
If a headline feeds the hunger, why risk ruining that validation by reading the article?
Also worth noting that I got angry at things AND had my biases confirmed. ;-)
Read the article. This system will get people killed in the name of efficiency. AI is nowhere near ready to route emergency calls.
What about callers that can't talk or have accents. The only proper way is to have a human answer and then transfer to an AI, not the other way around. Perhaps decades from now when theses systems are much more reliable we could trust it to be the front line, but we are nowhere near this yet.
If you have something to say, please say it. All I see is someone bitching about not having a discussion.
TOP EDIT: They were saying they read the article, not that I should read it. d'oh. Sooo, leaving my original below, but oops on misunderstanding! Sorry!
What do you fucking think I did?
I fucking well did.
Try reading all of my fucking comment then.
Depends on how they implement it. I would assume they're bound to be ahead on you on this one because some callers also can't say anything on the line because of danger, so they are aware of this issue. Since we don't have concrete details, we'll have to speculate on how they handle such things.
I won't bother to speculate further with you because I know you won't read it anyway.
No, I meant I read the article, sorry if that wasn't clear. You were bitching about people not reading it, I did.
We don't have to speculate, these same systems are being used as call agents and front line contacts for many industries now. Having dealt with these agents firsthand I can tell you they are extremely limited and pretty much garbage unless you have an issue that could easily be answered by looking at their web page.
There is no possible way to currently reduce the error rate, stop GIGO issues, audit the decision making process, stop hallucinations, etc. To even pretend these are ready for emergency situations is such a gross lack of discernment that I would consider it criminal in nature.
It is problematic to even provide the most basic service of screening of phone calls considering it could be costing previous time in an emergency. If it is a manpower issue then they should be fixing it there and not lookimg for a quick fix.
Also, you know it will not stop there. Their goal is triage so you know they are eventually moving towards far more than a simple public service emergency announcement. You will not be talking to a human in the future but a LLM that will kill people when it makes mistakes and won't be held accountable.
LOL. English ambiguity strikes again. Sorry for the misfire, totally my fault. Thanks for the kind reply and patience with me <3
I do disagree that there's no way to make it work pretty safe. Instead of defaulting to holding someone in the AI loop until they talk their way out of it, you can simply set it up to stay in the loop only if it's sure it needs to continue, i.e. anything other than something it gets like "Oh, yes, that's what I was calling about", it should dump them to a human.
And we don't know if they've set it up something like that or not. I humbly disagree that we know for sure they have not, no matter how other systems are configured.
And I also disagree that it will necessarily turn out poorly. It literally depends on how they do it. But that said, it is analgous to taking humans out of the driver's seat in the car. At some point, it will be statistically ten times safer for automated driving to drive you than letting people drive. And when we get to that point, people will be up in arms that automated driving is killing people - when it is literally only a tenth of the previous rate of death. But we humans don't like giving up that sort of control.
AI is new technology. I'm not totally behind them doing this, but I see the goal. And if they configure it correctly to fail-to-human rather than fail-to-AI-loop, I can see how this can save lives, not lose them. Of course if you're right and they screw it up it could be worse. I guess we'll see with time what they do and how it works.
But I firmly believe that trying to fight against all the tech is the wrong move. It's like trying to fight to keep woodchoppers employed. The tech is there and much of what it is doing is inevitable. What we should be focused on is solving wealth inequality, solving our oligarch problem, solving the lack of social safety nets, living wages, our government working for all of us, not just bilionaires.
So you and I probably aren't going to see eye to eye on this, but I can respect you better now that I know what you were saying better. :) Sorry to have flubbed that!
Pretty safe? I am sorry but if it is your life on the line or a loved one pretty safe is just not going to cut it. When the AI decides your dying grandmother isn't priority because of a reason no one can explain or audit what them.This is a huge safety issue than you hand wave away because you are apparently enamored with AI.
I am trying to keep an open mind but replacing human thinking in emergency situations is not a reasonable application. You want a LLM model to triage your medical care with an unproven model that can and does make serious mistakes?
https://www.foley.com/p/102ixtc/stanford-study-finds-high-percentage-of-errors-using-large-language-models-in-leg/
This is not speculation. These companies are selling snake oil at this point and you act as their carnival barker. I do think that decades in the future these systems will be ready for these challenges, but I am not insane enough to believe this roll out is anything other than a cash grab at this point.
I find your statement that humans don't like giving up control very disturbing. We obviously do give up control for routine low level things like GPS everyday. This is not what your are alluding to though. You are advocating for giving up a higher level of control to an algorithm that can't be held accountable.
Maybe you are ready for a world of half baked customer agents, managers, counselors, architects, artists, doctors, teachers, judges, emergency dispatchers, etc but I am not. Ceding our control to a corporatocracy of profit driven yes men is not going to end well.
I'll keep it simple and based on the article in question:
Right now, people who need help are waiting longer to talk to an operator becauase operators field lots of calls about large incidents (or well-witnessed incidents).
That's causing harm RIGHT NOW.
The theory is that if you offer callers a way to NOT TAKE UP OPERATOR TIME for incidents that are known, then the people who need help talk to an operator faster and get help faster.
That is what the article presents as what they're doing.
Everything you are saying is pure speculation.
You may well be right. We'll see.
There are plenty of ways to mitigate this problem which do not require a AI solution. I find it insulting that you think it is the best solution considering their is no evidence of its effectiveness. In fact, I have presented why there are many reasons for concern.
The willingness for government to invest in unproven technology rather than increase manpower or develop their own mass alert systems is dysfunctional to say the least. The fact that they often commit to these plans without consulting experts or asking for public comment is dishonest and corrupt.
I have already had to deal with multiple people suffering from AI psychosis so I am not the biggest fan. You say real harm and AI is already doing it everyday. I see your retreat to reductionisism but I don't find it compelling in this instance. As I already alluded to, we know where this is going.
And I find you taking insult to be tiring.
And where did I say it was the best solution? Do not put words in my mouth
Go off an be unhappy in your little world of unhappiness.
If you have a chip on your shoulder that is fine. You have already demonstrated your bombastic behavior as well and shown the ability for reflection. I appreciate that. Cheers!
Ironic. Attempts to be clever. Oh well.
Daddy chill
Just as long as you acknowledge the proper parental relationship here, son.
lol :P