The 13-member county Board of Commissioners last week unanimously approved a one-year, $41,000 contract with GovWorx’s “CommsCoach,” an AI system that will automatically record and transcribe calls to allow for not only call reviews and evaluations but also training simulations and “ultimately a higher level of service,” said Angela Elsey, county dispatch director.
“It gives us data-aided insight into our daily operations and it will allow us to train and perform more effectively,” Elsey told the board at a March 19 committee meeting. “It allows us to evaluate calls, transcribe audio, identify different trends and provide structural feedback to our staff.”
It will mean “clearer expectations, better feedback and hopefully stronger professional development and onboarding of new hires,” she added.
The Central Dispatch Center, located at the Communications and Technology (COMTEC) in Mount Clemens, is composed of 14 to 16 dispatchers operating around-the-clock to serve 13 communities: Sterling Heights, Mount Clemens; the townships of Clinton, Macomb, Harrison, Lenox, Ray, Richmond and Armada; and the villages of Armada and New Haven.
The center receives about 440,000 calls a year, from 800 to 1,500 per day, according to Elsey.
She added the center’s two supervisors currently must manually evaluate dispatchers’ performance by listening to calls, “tracking notes in different spreadsheets” and reviewing records to ensure policies are being followed, a process that requires a lot of time.
“Our supervisors have a lot of tasks,” she said. “They are spread very thin. In such a high-call-volume environment, we really need tools that ingest everything and give us what we’re looking for in one output.”
The current system “doesn’t give us the level of consistency or data or training feedback we need in such a high-volume environment,” she said.
The public will benefit due to lessons learned from the more thorough review of more calls, she added.
“For the community, it means better call handling, it means better documentation and ultimately a higher level of service,” she said.
The addition was already provided for in the nearly $12-million dispatch budget, which is funded the county, the state and a 42-cent (about $5 a year) levy on county taxpayers.
The contract was reached following a “sole-source bid” because Denver-based GovWorx was the only company that provides the full range of AI services that are needed, Elsey explained.
The one-year deal means that “as the contract nears expiration, we’ll determine if we want to renew and for how long,” she said.
GovWorx says its mission is to “empower public safety agencies with responsible AI that strengthens readiness, eliminates routine burden, and gives every responder the clarity and support they need to make a greater impact.”
In response to a question by Commissioner Michael Howard of Warren about calls from those who don’t speak English, Elsey said dispatchers can “conference in a translator” during a call and can communicate in 140 languages via text messages.
She said her office also is “working on live language translations.”
The most common non-English languages encountered by COMTEC are Spanish and Bengali, Elsey said.
COMTEC, which also houses the Department of Roads’ Traffic Operations Center, and the departments of Information Technology, and the Emergency Management and Communications, contains a 20 by 50 foot LCD video wall, which is shared with other dispatch centers in the county; eight traffic monitoring stations; Integrated communications and technologies; 20 dispatch stations, a computer lab and training room; and a command center.
The 25,000-square-foot facility opened in December 2013.
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