Emergency and non-emergency response systems are essential services provided by local governments and critical to protecting lives, the environment, and property. The effective handling of (non-)emergency calls is critical for public safety and well-being. By reducing the burden through non-emergency callers, residents in critical need of assistance through 911 will receive a fast and effective response. Collaborating with the Department of Emergency Communications (DEC) in Nashville, we analyzed 11,796 non-emergency call recordings and developed Auto311, the first automated system to handle 311 non-emergency calls, which (1) effectively and dynamically predicts ongoing non-emergency incident types to generate tailored case reports during the call; (2) itemizes essential information from dialogue contexts to complete the generated reports; and (3) strategically structures system-caller dialogues with optimized confidence. We used real-world data to evaluate the system's effectiveness and deployability. The experimental results indicate that the system effectively predicts incident type with an average F-1 score of 92.54%. Moreover, the system successfully itemizes critical information from relevant contexts to complete reports, evincing a 0.93 average consistency score compared to the ground truth. Additionally, emulations demonstrate that the system effectively decreases conversation turns as the utterance size gets more extensive and categorizes the ongoing call with 94.49% mean accuracy.

Former Chicago 911 dispatcher Keith Thornton Jr. joined "Fox & Friends First" to discuss how the crime surge is affecting law enforcement and communities nationwide. Understaffed 911 call centers across the country field non-emergency calls about stray animals or noise complaints on top of their workload of answering serious reports of medical emergencies, crimes and even death. Officials in Charleston County, South Carolina, however, are now leveraging artificial intelligence to streamline non-emergency calls in an effort to free up 911 operators to focus on getting first responders to the scene of emergency incidents as quickly as possible. "Our job is to serve the public the best way we can. So, I am not in any way demeaning anyone from the public, but someone who has their favorite cat stuck in a tree, that's an emergency for them as compared to someone's just been shot," Jim Lake, director of the Charleston County Consolidated Emergency Communications Center, told Fox News Digital in a recent phone interview.

AI, not humans, should immediately screen 911 calls. There are too many stories like this one about a 3-month-old baby who died in Florida. The baby's parents frantically called 911 on New Year's Day when their baby stopped breathing and turned blue. Staffing 911 and 311 phone lines is a critical challenge, especially since the pandemic. We have all read how people have left jobs in droves in the "Great Resignation." Most of the jobs changing have been a Great Reallocation of the workforce to positions with more meaning.

Large cities in California, Oregon and Texas are looking to artificial intelligence to combat call center staffing shortages and a backlog of resident calls. The ongoing U.S. staffing crisis has impacted the workforce across many organizations in what has been dubbed the "Great Resignation." No sector seems immune; 911 centers have been facing severe shortages that are causing both mistakes and delays in some areas. Some call centers, however, see AI as a way to bridge the gap between callers and the services they seek. AUSTIN, TEXAS: AI IN DISCUSSION For the Austin Police Department (APD), the staffing shortage started in late 2019, but the issue worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to APD Lt. Kenneth Murphy.