Embracing new technology in emergency comms centres improves public safety

It’s been a tumultuous few years for Australia’s emergency service contact centres. The pandemic presented a range of new operational challenges while call volumes spiked dramatically.

A few years later, hopes that volumes would normalise to pre-pandemic levels have been dashed. Whether it’s climate-related emergencies such as bushfires or social unrest events such as the West Gate Bridge protest, call volumes continue to rise. In fact, incidents attended by emergency services crews increased 36% in 2022–23, while the number of emergencies attended was up 6% from the previous year.

The increase in call volumes is compounded by staffing shortages. Unemployment is at historically low levels, which has created a skills shortage across the country. Contact centres and first responders in most states have not been immune to this trend.

While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to these challenges, technology can help alleviate some of these burdens and improve emergency response capabilities. When used correctly, it can help public safety agencies address some of their biggest pain points. For example, assistive AI and cloud technology have proven to be able to help emergency communications centres make faster, more informed decisions and better share information with other agencies and first responders, especially during periods of high demand, lessening the burden on their staff and resulting in improved outcomes for those they serve.

Addressing workforce burdens

Assistive AI can help detect and filter out background noise on calls, so the responders can better hear the call and save precious seconds by avoiding the need for callers to repeat themselves. It can also be used to help transcribe or translate calls through what’s known as natural language processing. For example, emergency responders across the world use voice-to-text technology, where assistive AI automatically transcribes the call. This helps to free up the call centre worker from having to make notes, or input information into their system.

Natural language processing can be used to live-translate for people who speak another language, cutting down response time by minutes. AI could also be used to detect background sounds and voices in domestic violence calls, which can help alert call-takers of another person’s presence or a situation unfolding during the call.

Assistive AI can play an important role helping emergency contact centre workers to identify patterns that might alert responders of a larger problem. It can work with weather, location and other statistical data so call-takers and dispatchers can identify hard-to-spot, complex situations earlier in their development. This kind of technology would be invaluable if there was a repeat of the 2016 thunderstorm asthma event in Melbourne. It could help contact centre experts to identify patterns in calls and improve information sharing with first responders, decrease response times and inform decision-making.

It’s important to remember that in public safety, AI is best used as an assistant rather than a replacement for human experience. Assistive AI can help first responders make informed decisions, respond faster and more efficiently, reduce impacts on communities and, ultimately, save more lives.

Next Generation Triple Zero

Another key technology to help emergency contact centres is Next Generation Triple Zero (NG000). This upgraded version of the traditional Triple Zero system has many components that enhance public safety, including integrated support for sharing of voice, photos, videos and text messages between the caller, emergency communications centre, and field responders to enable a more robust, efficient and safer response.

The technology also helps route calls to the appropriate answering point, manage non-emergency calls, integrate with apps and other tools, and collaborate with other emergency communications centres. The interconnected design of NG000 helps ensure improved resiliency and security of the public safety communications system by ensuring automatic failover and back-up capabilities in the event an emergency communications centre is overloaded with calls or otherwise unavailable.

Final thoughts

Modern emergency services infrastructure has proven to make a difference in staffing stress by giving emergency communicators more information and situational awareness to do their jobs better, thus improving the resiliency and redundancy of 000.

As technology advances and we look for more effective ways to address crime and safety, it’s critical for agencies to stay up to date on new technologies and tools that can address their challenges and improve public safety. We all want a safer future. Let’s embrace the technology that can help us get there.

David Dennis is Senior Business Development Manager at Hexagon Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial — a division of technology company Hexagon which helps to improve the resilience and sustainability of the world’s critical services and infrastructure. Its solutions turn complex data about people, places and assets into meaningful information for better, faster decision-making in public safety, utilities, defence, transportation and government.