New AI technology transforming call centers

DAYTON, Ohio — When a person calls 911 during an emergency, seconds are priceless, and it’s crucial that call takers receive and comprehend the information quickly and correctly.

New AI technology developed in Ohio at the Air Force Research Lab on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton is changing the game for call centers across the country.

“We get a digital signal from your radio, and we take care of the rest,” said Smart Response Technologies President Tim Shaw.

Shaw was born and raised in Xenia, Ohio and is a Marine Corps veteran.

He also spent more than 20 years as a special agent for the FBI, but these days he’s working to spread the word about a new product called “Delphini” and helping to get it into emergency call centers.

Using cloud-based AI technology, live radio transmissions and 911 calls are transcribed in real-time.

“We have the ability to add keywords you can put in. We don’t put them in, it’s your keywords, not ours,” said Shaw.

Being able to listen to a call and read the transcription can make a big difference when it comes to stress and burnout on the job,

“A lot of the 911 centers in this country have one or two people on because they’re small. So imagine answering the 911 call, dispatching on the radio, typing into the computer-aided dispatch, and trying to keep everything straight. That’s a phenomenal job,” he said.

 To help with accuracy, all language models are trained on live radio traffic.

“For smaller PSAPs or public safety answering points like mine, it’s an incredibly life-saving technology,” said Brad Flanagan.

Flanagan is the Emergency Operations Manager for the Pitkin County Regional Emergency Dispatch Center.

Located in Aspen, Colorado, they have a small team with a big job and have been using Delphini for about a year.

“Really, I didn’t even have to train my staff on it. It put up, it just streams those lines of everything that’s being heard and it creates a real-time reference for us. If the law is doing something in your ear, and the fire department has something critical to tell us, now we don’t have to stop and ask for a repeat and do all these other things. We can turn and look and continue on with what we were doing,” said Flanagan.

For Shaw, being able to spread the word about the technology from his home state is special.

“Here we are in the 21st century and we’re just now doing this. So we’re ahead of the curve here,” Shaw said.

The ultimate goal is to be sure a dispatcher doesn’t miss a communication.

“If we can help them understand what they’re saying and allow them to dispatch first responders to get to the scene with more and better information, then we’re accomplishing what we need to do as a company and that is, make communities safer, take some stress off the dispatchers,” Shaw said.

Delphini technology is the first of its kind.

Since it’s cloud-based, it can work from anywhere…even a laptop at home.

For about a year, it’s been used in call centers in states like Ohio, California, Texas, Colorado, Virginia and Florida.