New Orleans Becomes First Major US City to Let AI Answer 911 Calls

The city has deployed an AI voice system to handle emergency calls, and security researchers are already warning that these systems can be hacked — a high-stakes bet on automation in the one domain with the least tolerance for failure.

New Orleans has become the first major US city to use artificial intelligence to answer 911 calls, according to a post from @Sandy1Texas that circulated over the weekend. The motivation is familiar to anyone who has followed the staffing crisis in emergency dispatch: call centers are chronically understaffed, hold times can stretch dangerously long, and an automated system that triages routine calls promises to free human dispatchers for the emergencies that need them. The pitch is efficiency. The stakes are life and death.

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