By Jeff Winbourne
Cities and counties across the United States are reporting staffing shortages within their public safety departments and are looking for solutions. One technology being considered is chatbots — or bots — for non-emergency calls and for assistance during significant events.
WHAT ARE CHATBOTS?
A bot — short for “robot,” also called an internet bot — is a computer program that operates as a call center agent simulating a human responding to questions. Bots are programmed to automate certain tasks so they can run without specific instructions from humans. Chatbots, short for chatterbots, are “conversational agents,” a type of bot used in customer service call centers. It is a low-cost software application that use artificial intelligence (AI) to simulate human conversation through voice commands, text chats or both. They can mimic written or spoken human speech, simulating a conversation or interaction with a real person with more than 90% accuracy. This technology has evolved to the point that many companies have begun using chatbots for customer service tasks to cut call center costs.
IVR VS CHAT BOTS
Many government call centers, including 9-1-1, use interactive voice response (IVR) technology to get a caller to the right call taker. While IVR requires a precise or linear interaction, chatbots can understand disjointed or disrupted dialogue, which is how most people converse. Chatbots only need to find keywords in the text to know how to
reply, making it far easier to talk to them.
HOW ARE CHATBOTS USED NOW?
The pandemic has forced many jurisdictions to accelerate the use of chatbots to answer residents’ questions. A recent survey showed that 25% of counties and cities use chatbots for answering residents’ calls for services. Is this a technology that could relieve the shortages by replacing staff? As you can see from the examples below, chatbots provide a range of services to cities and counties, relieving call volume from hard pressed 9-1-1, 311 and health department call centers.
King County, Washington — A chatbot helps identify people calling for a professional nurse to determine if a person had Covid- 19-like symptoms and would be referred to a test center. The county estimated that the chabot saved 35% of the time nurses would have spent speaking to people without these
symptoms.1
Placer County, California — The county implemented the use of a bot called Ask Placer. The bot can answer more than 375 questions. The county notes that the chatbot can provide responses to questions about Placer County alerts, property taxes, COVID- 19 and emergency resources among others.2 New Orleans, Louisiana — In 2021, the New Orleans Parish Communications District (OPCD) launched an AI-powered 311 chatbot — dubbed “Jazz” — to streamline information sharing and improve customer
service.
Fairfax County, Virginia — The IT department worked with other departments to figure out what their needs were and what their most frequent questions were so they could build those into the county chatbots. Atlanta — In 2022, the city’s 311 system launched a chatbot to allow residents to check on the status of their service requests. Knoxville, Tennessee — The city launched a chatbot focusing on COVID-19
and the census.
Phoenix — The city implemented a citizen engagement chatbot with a 311 system to provide answer residents’ top queries like, “What is the waste pick-up schedule?” or
“Where can I pay my water bill?”
Austin, Texas, Police Department — To relieve staff shortages in 311, 9-1-1 and the police department, the agency plans to install an artificial intelligence system that can ask the same questions as human
operators.
CHATBOTS AND 9-1-1
There are several areas where chatbot technology could play a role in 9-1-1 operations, such as text-to-911 and foreign language
translation.
Chatbots can also manage overflow during a surge in emergency calls. When the number of calls exceeds the number of call takers, callers are placed on hold. Many callers are witnesses, attempting to report what they’ve seen and may hang up if their call is not answered quickly. To assist with overflow, chatbots can come in handy. They can answer the overflow calls and record the data. Chatbots can meet this need since they are infinitely scalable. The technology can theoretically answer an unlimited number of simultaneous phone calls, limited only by
available computing power.
Language translation is an essential capability for 9-1-1 and 311 centers. A 2019 study by the Center for Immigration Studies states that 67.3 million residents in the United States speak a language other than English at home.2 Fast, effective translation is crucial to providing services, especially with understaffed
centers.
Chatbots can help especially with spoken language. Not long ago, when communicating with a chatbot you needed to use exact
words or phrases for it to understand. Now, chatbots use speech analytics and language processing to interpret long, complex strings of words. This includes recognizing multiple
languages.
When selecting a product, keep in mind that chatbots use two different approaches to spoken language translation. Most use advanced neural machine translation engines to provide instant responses, enabling them to adapt to a large number of languages on the fly. The other approach is an AI-powered solution that may require responses to be translated by a human ahead
of time.
Text translation is also a challenge. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) leads a national effort with major nonprofit public safety associations to develop and
test a solution.
This year, the Indiana Statewide 911 Board launched a statewide solution for text-to-911 language translation. People can send text messages in their native language directly to 9-1-1 for help. The telecommunicator automatically receives a translated message in English. As the telecommunicator responds, the message is automatically translated into the native language of the sender. The Indiana system supports 108 languages available for text-to-911 translation. Looking forward, bots will play a key role in governmental operations and ECC operations. The time to start preparing for their usage is now.
Jeff Winbourne, former CEO of Winbourne Consulting, has been an APCO member for over 20 years and has more than 25 years’ experience as a subject matter expert and consultant with expertise in public safety technology, operations, technical training and project management.
REFERENCES
1. Government Technology. “More County Governments Are Using Chatbots — Here’s How” by Ben Miller. September 18, 2020. https://www.govtech.com/data/ more-county-governments-are-using-chatbots- -heres-how.html
2. Center for Immigration Studies. “67.3 Million in the United States Spoke a Foreign Language at Home in 2018” by Karen Zeigler and Steven A. Camarota. October 29, 2019. https://cis.org/Report/673- Million-United-States-Spoke-Foreign-Language- Home-2018
