this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
528 points (97.7% liked)

Technology

86982 readers
4049 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 40 points 1 day ago (45 children)

: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.

[–] percent@infosec.pub 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (20 children)

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

  • Too many people are all calling 911 about the same emergency.

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

  • 911 operators are all busy answering calls that are all reporting the same car fire
  • Long 911 hold time for someone with an emergency unrelated to the car fire

After implementing this tech

Bot: "Are you calling about the car fire on Seventh Street?"

  • If caller answers "yes":
    • AI bot tells them that responders have already been dispatched
  • If caller answers anything other than "yes":
    • Transfer to the next available human dispatcher
    • Greatly reduced hold time thanks to automated triage

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.

[–] 18107@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day 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.

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

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (18 replies)
load more comments (42 replies)