Posted on 08/09/2026 3:14:56 PM PDT by Libloather
New Orleans has become the first city in the US to use artificial intelligence to answer emergency 911 calls — but critics warn it could have deadly consequences.
The Orleans Parish Communication District — which gets over a thousand emergency dials a day, in what is among the highest volume of calls in the country — is routing the 911 calls to an AI agent that decides which ones get bumped to human dispatchers and which get handled by the bot itself, according to the Shreveport Times.
“I was a 911 dispatcher for 11 years and this is the worst idea you could possibly think of,” warned an online critic using the name Boxy, who claimed to be a first responder.
The new tool, known as AI Emergency Call Triage, was first deployed in Louisiana’s largest city in late July after being tested on its 311 hotline.
The triage bot analyzes calls to prioritize which emergencies should be handled by humans, while it handles repeat calls or low-priority ones to avoid inundating dispatchers, the Times explained.
OPCD Executive Director Karl Fasold, however, emphasized that the AI is not replacing human dispatchers, and said the system will mainly be used when the caller is within roughly 200 meters of a crash that has already been reported and when all human call-takers are busy, according to local CBS News affiliate WWL-TV.
Critics, nonetheless, fear it could have deadly consequences.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
What do you expect? It’s New Orleans.
You wanna know lazy come to NC.
At least they will get what I say transcribed. These ghetto mumblers can’t understand English and better than they speak it.
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