VIDEO: Of the 50 or so calls Ian Harrington will answer on his shift as a 911 dispatcher, about half of them are not emergencies. “They’re still important, just not as important, like a barking dog or a parked vehicle,” Harrington said. 911 dispatchers at PenCom on the Olympic Peninsula take about 85,000 non-emergency calls every year. Those take up a lot of time. It’s time that would be better spent dealing with real emergencies. And time is increasingly precious for PenCom dispatchers. They are severely short-staffed.
At one point, only nine of 20 positions were filled, making for long days and even longer weeks. “Some (weeks) you might work five days in a row,” Harrington said. “Five 12-hour shifts can be a lot.” Enter “Eva,” an artificial intelligence dispatcher who has conversations just like a human. As opposed to prompts that ask callers to press a number on their phones, Eva has logical conversations. The new technology only answers non-emergency calls. That allows dispatchers to prioritize issues that need immediate attention.
AI listens for keywords that may indicate crime or violence. It even picks up inflections in the caller’s voice to sense trouble. If any of those criteria are met, the call goes directly to a real person. “If the AI detects that there is a potential life-threatening or property-threatening emergency that is happening right now, it doesn’t hesitate,” said Karl Hatton, Port Angeles Police Department deputy director. “It just transfers it to a dispatcher.”
