Emergency dispatchers have a tough job, trying to handle as many calls as they can as quickly as they can, while still making sure they're asking the right kinds of questions that could help end up saving someone's life, and in the UK, in order to tackle the challenge, the National Health Service (NHS) recently announced they were rolling out a bot to help handle calls. Now though many more dispatchers could start getting additional support from another source, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) called Corti, an AI agent that dispatchers in Copenhagen first started trialling in 2016. Unlike other AI's what makes Corti unique is the fact that it can listen in on calls, understand words and sounds, and even recognise, just from verbal cues, the "sound" of heart attacks and other medical conditions, a technique that researchers in the USA have also been pursing with some success. Corti then prompts the emergency professional with the right questions to get a more accurate diagnosis. Corti helps out in other more obvious ways too, such as reminding to ask whoever's on the phone for the address of the incident and ensuring the ambulance en route is headed to the right place, but that said much of its value lies in helping dispatchers refine their diagnosis by detecting and analysing background clues.

Emergency dispatchers have a tough job assuring callers while trying to ask questions that could save the patient's life. But soon they could get backup from AI. Starting in 2016, dispatchers in Copenhagen began getting help from an artificial intelligence named Corti that understands the words and sounds during calls to recognize cardiac arrest, then prompts the emergency professional with the right questions to get a more accurate diagnosis. Corti helps out in other ways, too, like reminding to ask whoever's on the phone for the address of the incident and ensuring the ambulance en route is headed to the right place. But much of its value lies in refining its diagnosis by detecting background clues. In one incident, recounted by Fast Company, the dispatcher had concluded a man who'd fallen off the roof had broken his back.