How Deep Learning Can Keep You Safe with Real-Time Crime Alerts

Citizen scans thousands of public first responder radio frequencies 24 hours a day in major cities across the US. The collected information is used to provide real-time safety alerts about incidents like fires, robberies, and missing persons to more than 5M users. Having humans listen to 1000 hours of audio daily made it very challenging for the company to launch new cities. To continue scaling, we built ML models that could discover critical safety incidents from audio. Our custom software-defined radios (SDRs) capture large swathes of radio frequency (RF) and create optimized audio clips that are sent to an ML model to flag relevant clips.