The AI agent has been trained on the last three years' worth of 311 calls. It's been programmed to sound "customer service-centric, polite," said Karl Fasold, executive director of the Orleans Parish Communications District. And it knows how to pronounce Tchoupitoulas.
"It won't be able to generate tickets (for service requests). It will provide information. But 50% of our 311 calls are simply providing information," said Fasold, who has a degree in computer science and served as the district's director of technology before being appointed to its top role in 2023.
A bigger shift has already happened. Since 2023, AI agents have been answering and triaging certain 911 calls in New Orleans.
The communications district was among the first in the nation to adopt AI-assisted 911 call triaging. Carbyne, a company that makes software for emergency call centers, had recently upgraded the district's legacy 911 system to a cloud-native 911 product and was working on an AI agent.
"I was intrigued by the idea," said Fasold, whose staff often became overwhelmed with surges of calls. He worked with Carbyne to analyze where the spikes were coming from.
"We identified a repeated pattern coming from the data," said Alex Dizengof, chief technology officer and cofounder of Carbyne. "The pattern was every morning and evening during rush hour, there would be an accident, and hundreds of callers called in about the same thing."
The result was a long queue that buried critical 911 calls.
"If you're calling about a heart attack, you go to the back of the queue," Dizengof said. "The queue is blind. Call takers aren't able to prioritize the calls."
But AI agents could. The Carbyne system integrated the computer-aided dispatch system used by first responders, so AI agents "know where all the auto accident incidents are in New Orleans that are live... at any given time," Fasold said.
Anyone calling 911 within a 200-meter radius of a live auto accident is now immediately routed to the AI agent, who asks if the caller is reporting the wreck. If the answer is yes, the AI agent assures them everything's being handled. If the answer is no, callers are connected to a human.
"It has helped tremendously," Fasold says. "We figure we are getting two hours a day of call taker time back, at a minimum."
For an agency that he estimates is about 40% short of full staffing due to fiscal uncertainty, every second counts, as it does for 911 callers in life-or-death situations. In that respect, too, eliminating tedium can potentially be a lifesaver.
"We as humans get tired of mundane, repetitive work," Dizengof said. "And if it is repetitive, critical work, this could also be dangerous."
The 911 AI agent only answers car accident-related calls. It will never be used for real emergency calls, Fasold says.
Aron Culotta and Nick Mattei, both computer science professors at Tulane University and co-directors of its Center for Community-Engaged Artificial Intelligence, noted that information technology has been used to reduce human contact since call centers gained traction in the 1980s—and that many people are now comfortable installing Ring cameras or interacting with Alexa.
"Squeamishness here might come from the fact that ... your government is doing this, and not something that you bought and brought into your house," Mattei said. "But for very well-contained applications, I think this can be a powerful way to free up government resources. ... Just because it's AI doesn't mean it's bad."
There is little national policy governing AI use in emergency response, and no city policy that Culotta, Mattei or Fasold are aware of. Callers to 911 and 311 in Orleans Parish are not explicitly told when they are speaking to an AI system, though the voice is obviously not human, and the communications district does not plan to announce when the 311 AI agents go live.
During the Bourbon Street terrorist attack, an AI agent answered the first two 911 calls before routing them to a human. For roughly 20 seconds, the incident was classified as a hit-and-run crash, Fasold said.
The responsibility, Culotta said, falls on the public to demand transparency and accountability.
“AI can serve our communities in a better way and help save lives,” Dizengof said. “But it has to come with proper controls, where ultimately a human makes the final decision about when and how AI will act.”
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