SAN DIEGO (CNS) - Non-emergency calls to the San Diego County Sheriff's Office are being answered by an artificial intelligence processing system beginning this weekend, in an effort to reduce waiting times for callers who do not require a 911 response.
All emergency calls to 911 will continue to be answered by trained emergency services dispatchers, according to a statement released Friday by the SDSO. Calls to the non-emergency number are now being greeted by a carefully trained and tested voice AI agent known as Hyper, officials said.
The AI asks a short series of questions to transfer callers to the correct sheriff's resource, provide callers with the information they are seeking or connect them with a dispatcher.
"Hyper's Voice AI system helps get callers the assistance they need faster. It's a practical use of technology that improves outcomes for our community," said Ashish Kakkad, chief information officer for the San Diego County Sheriff's Office. "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."
The Sheriff's Office answers up to 400,000 non-emergency calls per year, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Under the new system, all interactions will be recorded and transcribed in real time.
Hyper will immediately transfer the non-emergency call to a trained sheriff's emergency services dispatcher if the situation is an emergency, if 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, or the request falls outside the system's trained standard operating procedures.
The sheriff's non-emergency number at 858-868-3200 should be used to report past crimes, request information, make a report or reach a member of the sheriff's office when there is no emergency. The emergency 911 number should still be used if there is an immediate threat to life or property, a crime is in progress, or there is a serious injury, fire or medical emergency.
Hyper is a public safety technology company building AI voice systems designed specifically for non-emergency police communications. Its platform helps emergency communication centers reduce wait times, increase efficiency and improve service to the public by automatically handling routine calls while ensuring urgent calls reach human dispatchers immediately.
Hyper was founded by veteran technology engineers, former government officials and dispatch experts with deep-voice AI experience.
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