:sigh: Yet again, nobody reads the fucking article and it is VERY obvious from most of the comments. If you can’t be bothered, then don’t fucking comment.
If you had READ the article: They’re answering with the AI saying like “Are you calling about X?” If the callers says no, they are transferred to a human. If they ARE calling about an incident, then they can get updates and information about it.
Now, I grant that this is still not perfect, but the stated goal is humans spending less time talking to people reporting an incident already reported so they can actually talk to people needing help faster.
Assuming that works out, this is actually a good idea and an improvement.
Now, if you wanna be cynical about it, fine. But just read the damn article and be cynical about what’s actually happening, not about what you think from the headline, or all you end up looking like an ass.
I came into the comments to have a good discussion on the issue. I should have known better. I’m so irritated by the majority of comments that I lost interested in the topic itself, even though there’s at least one ofther comment I saw also pointing out what the article says. But no, the majority of you can’t be bothered, so screw this. And you bitch about reddit.
Holy shit, I’m actually surprised how bad the rest of the comments are… And the volume of them!
I’ll try to TL;DR it for the lemmings, with formatting that is (hopefully) easy to understand for even the most rotten of brains.
TL;DR
The problem
Too many people are all calling 911 about the same emergency.
I’ll use this example scenario below: People keep driving past a burning car on a busy road, and many of them call 911. (This will continue to happen until an emergency responder arrives.)
Before implementing this tech
911 operators are all busy answering calls that are all reporting the same car fire
Long 911 hold time for someone with an emergency unrelated to the car fire
After implementing this tech
Bot: “Are you calling about the car fire on Seventh Street?”
If caller answers “yes”:
AI bot tells them that responders have already been dispatched
If caller answers anything other than “yes”:
Transfer to the next available human dispatcher
Greatly reduced hold time thanks to automated triage
If the critical failure point is accurately classifying “yes” or “not yes,” even the dumbest[1] models could handle that – and I doubt they use the dumbest models for 911 triage.
Even if it’s not 100% perfect every time, this still sounds like a net positive.
AI bot tells them that responders have already >been dispatched
So you’re gating whether or not a caller in an emergency gets to speak to a human based on the audio recognition of a robot?
Easy enough to make it so that if the bot doesn’t hear a yes or a no clearly it defaults to forwarding the call, but what happens when a person says no and the bot “hears” yes?
I believe I touched on that in my last sentence, but I can elaborate:
That will probably happen – neural networks are approximation algorithms. It’s a question of how often that happens.
What percentage of the calls get misclassified? And what’s the threshold percentage that would be needed for the triage bot to be a net positive?
It sounds like they have an idea of these numbers based on data collected from the non-emergency line, so it’s not like they’re just blindly jumping into this.
I don’t think there’s any net positive that would account for not answering an emergency call at all.
Exactly. That’s what they want to solve.
TL;DR: Even when callers reach the triage bot, they can still reach a human much faster than without the triage bot.
Comparing again:
WITHOUT the triage tech:
NOBODY (or nothing) answers the call for a long while, because the caller is stuck in a very long queue of calls waiting to tell them about the same emergency
WITH the triage tech:
AI bot answers the call instantly and probably knows how to help because the call is probably about the same emergency that 95% of the other calls are about
so 95% less spam for the human operators to get through
If the call is NOT about the same thing as the others, the caller can simply say that (i.e., “no”), and they reach a human within, say, 5-10 seconds because the operators aren’t busy trying to get through the spam calls
They chose this tech because it has already proven to be a net positive on their non-emergency line.
AI is absolutely not needed for this, and is only a liability.
They could say “press 1 if you are calling about X” or even “if you are calling about X, we are already aware of it. If not, you will be transferred to an operator in a moment”.
An automated system like this is easy to implement, easy to audit, and will fail in expected and managable ways.
AI is nondeterministic, and will fail randomly in very unexpected ways.
I (mostly) agree. I was just TL;DR’ing it for the shocking number of people who are commenting about things that are already addressed in the article that they didn’t bother reading.
I hesitate to agree with “absolutely” though. I don’t know enough about their situation to confidently have an opinion that strong[1].
AI can be useful for some dynamic situations – and 911 call centers can get pretty “dynamic” at times.
Imagine a busy 911 call center. Clippy appears (wearing a firefighter uniform) on an operator’s screen with a message like “The last 4 calls were about the same car fire. There are currently 9 calls in the queue. Want me to triage?”
It would take WAY less time for a busy operator to click “Yes” than it would to step away and go record some voice message, configure some automated thing, etc.
I only ever knew one dispatcher personally, and even in her town (much lower population than New Orleans’), they were overworked. ↩︎
I increasingly hate Lemmy for the way this seems to constantly happen on this topic and others. It’s like users are caricatures of opinions instead of people. Which, hey, maybe that’s prescient.
I think it’s an internet thing, not a Lemmy thing, to be honest.
I’m a voracious reader. I’m on Lemmy and basically not on reddit anymore because I want to have good discussions. And sometimes the discussions are pretty decent, but things like this put me off a bit.
It’s still a pretty decent platform overall. Although that might say more about the state of the internet at large than it does say good things about Lemmy. heh. But I’m still here. :)
You don’t need “ai” for this though. IVRs have been doing this for literal decades. Your average dialup ISP had a standard option for times of outages ffs.
Yeah, its not handling “my grandma is dying pls send emt” calls, but more “The concert hall is on fire” call #450.
That being said, I disagree with most applications of AI that prevent human interaction. Just because im the 40th person calling about a situation doesnt mean my call is useless, it means i might have new information on an evolving situation.
Read the article. This system will get people killed in the name of efficiency. AI is nowhere near ready to route emergency calls.
What about callers that can’t talk or have accents. The only proper way is to have a human answer and then transfer to an AI, not the other way around. Perhaps decades from now when theses systems are much more reliable we could trust it to be the front line, but we are nowhere near this yet.
If you have something to say, please say it. All I see is someone bitching about not having a discussion.
All I see is someone bitching about not having a discussion.
Try reading all of my fucking comment then.
What about
Depends on how they implement it. I would assume they’re bound to be ahead on you on this one because some callers also can’t say anything on the line because of danger, so they are aware of this issue. Since we don’t have concrete details, we’ll have to speculate on how they handle such things.
I won’t bother to speculate further with you because I know you won’t read it anyway.
:sigh: Yet again, nobody reads the fucking article and it is VERY obvious from most of the comments. If you can’t be bothered, then don’t fucking comment.
If you had READ the article: They’re answering with the AI saying like “Are you calling about X?” If the callers says no, they are transferred to a human. If they ARE calling about an incident, then they can get updates and information about it.
Now, I grant that this is still not perfect, but the stated goal is humans spending less time talking to people reporting an incident already reported so they can actually talk to people needing help faster.
Assuming that works out, this is actually a good idea and an improvement.
Now, if you wanna be cynical about it, fine. But just read the damn article and be cynical about what’s actually happening, not about what you think from the headline, or all you end up looking like an ass.
I came into the comments to have a good discussion on the issue. I should have known better. I’m so irritated by the majority of comments that I lost interested in the topic itself, even though there’s at least one ofther comment I saw also pointing out what the article says. But no, the majority of you can’t be bothered, so screw this. And you bitch about reddit.
Holy shit, I’m actually surprised how bad the rest of the comments are… And the volume of them!
I’ll try to TL;DR it for the lemmings, with formatting that is (hopefully) easy to understand for even the most rotten of brains.
TL;DR
The problem
I’ll use this example scenario below: People keep driving past a burning car on a busy road, and many of them call 911. (This will continue to happen until an emergency responder arrives.)
Before implementing this tech
After implementing this tech
If the critical failure point is accurately classifying “yes” or “not yes,” even the dumbest[1] models could handle that – and I doubt they use the dumbest models for 911 triage.
Even if it’s not 100% perfect every time, this still sounds like a net positive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACmydtFDTGs ↩︎
So you’re gating whether or not a caller in an emergency gets to speak to a human based on the audio recognition of a robot?
Easy enough to make it so that if the bot doesn’t hear a yes or a no clearly it defaults to forwarding the call, but what happens when a person says no and the bot “hears” yes?
I believe I touched on that in my last sentence, but I can elaborate:
That will probably happen – neural networks are approximation algorithms. It’s a question of how often that happens.
What percentage of the calls get misclassified? And what’s the threshold percentage that would be needed for the triage bot to be a net positive?
It sounds like they have an idea of these numbers based on data collected from the non-emergency line, so it’s not like they’re just blindly jumping into this.
I don’t think there’s any net positive that would account for not answering an emergency call at all.
Can you really justify someone not being able to reach help at all in place of everyone being able to reach it albeit slower?
As a lifelong first responder, I couldn’t get behind something like this at all.
:sigh: Okay, I’ll try to break it down even more…
Exactly. That’s what they want to solve.
TL;DR: Even when callers reach the triage bot, they can still reach a human much faster than without the triage bot.
Comparing again:
WITHOUT the triage tech:
WITH the triage tech:
They chose this tech because it has already proven to be a net positive on their non-emergency line.
I have to agree with you one hundred, /u/percent
:)
AI is absolutely not needed for this, and is only a liability.
They could say “press 1 if you are calling about X” or even “if you are calling about X, we are already aware of it. If not, you will be transferred to an operator in a moment”.
An automated system like this is easy to implement, easy to audit, and will fail in expected and managable ways.
AI is nondeterministic, and will fail randomly in very unexpected ways.
I (mostly) agree. I was just TL;DR’ing it for the shocking number of people who are commenting about things that are already addressed in the article that they didn’t bother reading.
I hesitate to agree with “absolutely” though. I don’t know enough about their situation to confidently have an opinion that strong[1].
AI can be useful for some dynamic situations – and 911 call centers can get pretty “dynamic” at times.
Imagine a busy 911 call center. Clippy appears (wearing a firefighter uniform) on an operator’s screen with a message like “The last 4 calls were about the same car fire. There are currently 9 calls in the queue. Want me to triage?” It would take WAY less time for a busy operator to click “Yes” than it would to step away and go record some voice message, configure some automated thing, etc.
I only ever knew one dispatcher personally, and even in her town (much lower population than New Orleans’), they were overworked. ↩︎
This is Lemmy and it says AI. Expect nobody to read and for panties to twist so hard their legs come off.
As I replied to a similar comment, in fairness - my panties came off as well. hehe (but for a valid reason, dammit! :slams fist on desk:)
I increasingly hate Lemmy for the way this seems to constantly happen on this topic and others. It’s like users are caricatures of opinions instead of people. Which, hey, maybe that’s prescient.
I think it’s an internet thing, not a Lemmy thing, to be honest.
I’m a voracious reader. I’m on Lemmy and basically not on reddit anymore because I want to have good discussions. And sometimes the discussions are pretty decent, but things like this put me off a bit.
It’s still a pretty decent platform overall. Although that might say more about the state of the internet at large than it does say good things about Lemmy. heh. But I’m still here. :)
It’s a human thing, above all else. If they wanted logical reasonable discussion, they should talk to robots. Except that’s the thing they hate
You don’t need “ai” for this though. IVRs have been doing this for literal decades. Your average dialup ISP had a standard option for times of outages ffs.
Still, it’s a sloppy headline designed for clicks or thumbs up. It would be more accurate if it was “AI is to initially screen calls….”
sensationalized headlines aren’t new. If anything they’re more important now than ever
So, Lemmy really seems to love these two things:
If a headline feeds the hunger, why risk ruining that validation by reading the article?
Also worth noting that I got angry at things AND had my biases confirmed. ;-)
Yeah, its not handling “my grandma is dying pls send emt” calls, but more “The concert hall is on fire” call #450.
That being said, I disagree with most applications of AI that prevent human interaction. Just because im the 40th person calling about a situation doesnt mean my call is useless, it means i might have new information on an evolving situation.
Read the article. This system will get people killed in the name of efficiency. AI is nowhere near ready to route emergency calls.
What about callers that can’t talk or have accents. The only proper way is to have a human answer and then transfer to an AI, not the other way around. Perhaps decades from now when theses systems are much more reliable we could trust it to be the front line, but we are nowhere near this yet.
If you have something to say, please say it. All I see is someone bitching about not having a discussion.
What do you fucking think I did?
I fucking well did.
Try reading all of my fucking comment then.
Depends on how they implement it. I would assume they’re bound to be ahead on you on this one because some callers also can’t say anything on the line because of danger, so they are aware of this issue. Since we don’t have concrete details, we’ll have to speculate on how they handle such things.
I won’t bother to speculate further with you because I know you won’t read it anyway.
Daddy chill
Just as long as you acknowledge the proper parental relationship here, son.
lol :P