Onondaga County’s 911 center recently began using artificial intelligence technology to assist with calls. The technology allows for live transcription, location, and call summarization, and will in the future provide live translation, according to county executive spokesperson Justin Sayles.  The county will spend $350,000 this year on the technology, said Sayles, and the county will consider annual renewals of the product. The funding was approved as part of the Onondaga County Department of Emergency Communications’ 2026 budget.  The technology was developed by Prepared, a company that makes AI products.  The county’s 911 center has a significant staffing shortage, according to Sayles and Emergency Communications Commissioner Julie Corn. County officials hope AI will help prevent burnout.  “911 call-takers take call after call, day after day with the stress that there is zero room for error,” said Sayles. “Having tools that aid in their success and support them to be their best is one way we can limit burnout.” While the county expects the technology to help with burnout, some experts are more skeptical about AI’s utility for 911 call takers. Concerns range from AI’s ability to triage emergency calls to its ability to effectively translate for non-English speaking callers.  In an October presentation to the public safety committee, Corn said that the use of the technology “falls right in line with the county executive’s initiative to have AI programs in his vision.”  The AI 911 system works like this: Non-emergency phone calls — those that come into the 911 center on ten-digit numbers — will be transferred directly to an AI bot. If “key emergency words or scenarios” are mentioned, the AI bot is trained to transfer the call back to a human, said Sayles. He added that other calls would be determined to be non-emergencies “in the same way they are now” and transferred to the bot. Prepared will provide a live transcription of emergency 911 calls, but a human will write the messages sent to emergency responders. Call takers will still be expected to take notes on their calls. The call recordings, notes and AI-drafted transcript will all be saved separately and will be able to be compared, Sayles said. Only the notes will be able to be edited, he said.  Ben Winters, the director of AI and data privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, said he would be “very worried” about the potential for false negatives if a bot were to triage emergency calls.  Winters also said AI is not equally good at all forms of transcription. When people are rushed, crying, using headphones or on speaker, it is more likely to miss what is being said. He added that 911 callers might not feel comfortable sharing exactly what is going on, and that call-takers are trained to try to get needed information from callers.  Winters said the redundancy in record keeping was good but questioned when the AI transcription might actually be used.  “What is the record that they go with?” he asked. “What are the ones they report and act on?” Onondaga County is also linguistically diverse. As of 2024, the most commonly spoken languages among people with low English proficiency include Ukrainian, Nepali and Burmese. Sayles said that the technology would be able to translate all these languages.  But the AI tools powering translation are not always representative of how native speakers speak, said Aliya Bhatia, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology who researches multilingual AI. The AI powering translation services may have fewer natively-created digitized examples of some languages to train on, she said, which could mean that translations might feature overly complicated or outdated words that people do not use regularly and might not understand.  Bhatia gave an example: If AI translates the English word “vaccine” to an equivalent of the older ‘innoculation,’ the listener might not understand those words. She added that translation tools sometimes even make up new words when they don’t know the correct one.  Translation tools should be developed and evaluated with local language speakers and community-based organizations, Bhatia said.  “AI-based translation tools may come in handy when we need legible translations in a pinch but we shouldn’t confuse them as capable of the fluent, nuanced, and accurate translations people need when they are seeking emergency and life-saving services,” said Bhatia.  The county currently translates calls using Voiance. The program uses live interpreters. The county will still contract with Voiance, said Sayles. In the future, a bot will likely translate live, but in the meantime, the county will work to ensure the change in translation methods doesn’t leave service gaps.  Prepared is used in other 911 departments across the county, including in Baltimore. Sayles said Onondaga County had “solid working relationships” with other counties using Prepared. So far, those counties have raised no concerns, he said.  Prepared was recently purchased by Axon Enterprise, a company that develops technology for the military and police.  In a press release shortly after the acquisition, Axon boosted Prepared as a means of “owning the first 120 seconds” of an emergency call. Axon believes the technology could help supervisors to see “risk patterns and coaching opportunities” in their callers, the press release said.  One of Axon’s other AI products, the controversial Draft One generative AI police report writer, has been accused of being “designed to defy transparency” by the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Sayles did not directly say whether it would integrate other Axon AI programs — like Draft One — into county operations but said the county is “constantly evaluating opportunities to integrate AI” into county operations. “The AI technology continues to improve,” said Sayles. “At the end of the day, the call-taker is still fully trained in listening to calls and capturing and translating information for dispatch.” The post Onondaga County begins using AI to translate, transcribe and summarize 911 calls appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less