When someone calls 911, every second matters. But what about the thousands of interactions that aren’t true emergencies? A new AI tool is helping Virginia Beach, Va., manage those calls, giving dispatchers the breathing room they need to focus on life-or-death situations.
That shift is happening through the city’s use of Amazon Connect, bringing artificial intelligence and natural language processing into the nonemergency call workflow to help modernize how public safety communications are handled. The change essentially came from necessity, as high call volumes and a smaller workforce pushed the municipality’s Emergency Communications and Citizen Services Department to find innovative ways to manage increasing demand.
“We actually process more nonemergency calls per year,” Jada Lee, director for Emergency Communications and Citizen Services at Virginia Beach, said. “The same people in my department that process 911 calls on a daily basis are also responsible for processing 5,000 nonemergency calls.”…