Non-emergency calls to the San Diego Sheriff’s Department will no longer be greeted by a person.
Instead they will be routed to an artificial processing system “designed to reduce waiting times for up to 400,000 nonemergency calls per year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” the department announced March 6,
The system will be run by San Francisco-based company Hyper.
Calls to the non-emergency number will now be greeted by a carefully trained and tested Voice AI agent, officials said. The AI asks a short series of questions to transfer the caller to the correct Sheriff’s resource, provide the caller with the information they are seeking or connect the caller with a dispatcher.
“Hyper’s Voice AI system helps get callers the assistance they need faster,” said Ashish Kakkad, Chief Information Officer at the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office. “It’s a practical use of technology that improves outcomes for our community.”
“By automating the routing of non-emergency calls, our trained call takers can focus more of their time on emergency situations that require judgment, empathy and critical thinking,” Kakkad added.
The department said nonemergency phone calls will be turned over to trained dispatchers in specific situations, including:
- the situation is an emergency
- the system does not understand the caller
- the caller requires a language or translation service not supported by the system
- unusual activity or discrepancies are detected
- the request falls outside the system’s trained standard operating procedures.
Authorities said the public should call 9-1-1 if there is an immediate threat to life or property, a crime in progress, serious injury, fire or medical emergency.
All emergency calls to 9-1-1 will continue to be answered by trained Sheriff’s Emergency Services Dispatchers, officials said.
Non-emergency calls to the department include those that report past crimes, request information, make a report or reach a member of the San Diego County Sheriff ’s Office when there is no emergency.
