SCDF turns to artificial intelligence to help emergency call dispatchers

SINGAPORE -With Singapore's emergency dispatch phone operators receiving almost 200,000 calls for assistance a year, every minute is vital. In an effort to ease their workload, the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) and four other Government agencies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and have developed a speech recognition system that can transcribe and log each call received in real time - even if it is in Singlish. For now the system is programmed to recognise English and Mandarin with some Hokkien and Malay, though it could be customised to incorporate others. AI Singapore (AISG), a programme under the National Research Foundation, is investing $1.25 million to set up the AI Speech Lab which developed the system. The lab claims to have created the first code-switch - or mixed-lingual - speech recognition engine.