July 28, 2025 | 2:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Think Tank
Chad Brothers, ENP, CMCP, CSM, PMP
The current state of the bot revolution in emergency communications centers (ECCs) is largely focused on how much it can divert callers from 9-1-1. That’s because few centers put chatbots in the front line for emergency callers, said Chad Brothers, vice president of emergency services program, Viiz Communications.
Voice bots and chatbots are suited to fielding non-emergency calls and general government queries, clearing the way for public safety telecommunicators to concentrate on emergencies.
Chatbots are text driven. Voice bots translate voice into transcripts. Both interact with large language models. Adding a chatbot to the community government website or the ECC website could reduce the voice traffic in the ECC.
Brothers explained some of the choices that administrators must make when implementing chatbots. He said they can be set up to draw information from the web in general, from designated websites or to give particular answers to particular questions.
“It’s like a dog that wants to please you. It’s always going to come back with a tennis ball. It just may not be the right color or the right shape.”
To get the right tennis ball (i.e., the correct answer to a caller query) depends on the accuracy of the information the bot is trained on and on the type of information that it accesses in response to queries. It also depends on conversational design. Brothers said the ideal is for the large language model to be trained on relevant local facts, such as city government dispatching and city services. Brothers said queries about dispatching dog catchers, for instance, could wind up with trucking dispatch answers if the bot is turned loose on the web to find its own answers. In addition to training it on local information, directing the bot to buckets of local information to use in response to queries, such as the local government website, may be more fruitful than more general search parameters.
Our industry has been slow to adapt, Brothers said, because, “We have a very very limited fault tolerance for failure”, but AI has now firmly planted roots in 9-1-1 – fifty percent of the audience at this session said they had deployed AI right now. Policy makers need to research which type of AI meets their needs and comfort level.
Voice bots are not perfect transcribers of language, but they tend to be good enough to get the job done. Some ECC directors may consider this insufficient. Brothers said a change in mindset is needed to effectively prioritize the lifesaving work of public safety telecommunications.
Written by Rick Goldstein. Cynthia Fell contributed to this article.
