AI Virtual assistant on the emergency line
Voicebot receives reports of fires and natural disasters when lines are overloaded
Artificial intelligence becomes a common part of our world, and it’s improving at a relentless pace. Clever solutions and technologies are now even involved in saving human lives. For example, in the form of a digital voice assistant that receives and records emergency line calls when human operators are overloaded. The development of such a voicebot now employs the team of Czech startup Born Digital, together with other subjects from academia, and experts from other companies.
An AI virtual operator will start its future service whenever many incoming calls overload the emergency number 112. Most often in cases of various mass disasters. “We had first developed a voicebot that can receive reports of various cases of fire. And because we had achieved good testing results, we are now expanding the range of received events to include reports related to extreme wind conditions, such as storms or tornadoes,” says Born Digital directing solver Ondřej Ťupa. However, the field of received cases may not end with fires and wind. The virtual assistant will gradually learn to process and transmit reports on all categories of mass disasters, from fires, through storms to floods.
Training with real data
Because of the vast amount of training data and the need for a high level of accuracy and reliability required to saving human lives, when the voice assistant development project ends in a year and a half, only a demonstrator compatible with the fire brigade crisis line will be ready. “This is mainly a research project that will show that this system is feasible. Later, the representatives of the emergency line services will decide on the actual involvement of the AI in practice,” explains the project manager Petr Berglowiec from the Faculty of Safety Engineering of the Technical University of Ostrava.
The virtual assistant must be absolutely reliable before it starts to operate. That’s why it already works with real cases of mass disasters. Thousands of recordings of telephone calls to the emergency line helped in its development when Born Digital experts examined them at the Training Facility of the Fire and Rescue Service in Brno. It is the behavior of professional human operators, along whose side the solution will work in the future, that the digital assistant tries to mimic as close as possible.
At the moment of its future deployment, the AI will have a clear task — to obtain all the necessary data from the calls, such as the type of disaster, location, number of wounded and contact information. Then it passes all the data onto experienced operation officers. They will then evaluate whether and how firefighters intervene or contact the caller and ask for more details of the case. Thus, the decisive factor remains in human hands.
Digital assistant passes the received information in the form of a so-called data sentence, which contains a summary of the essential data that the operator obtained from the caller. “Human operators fill similar data sentence. We aim for the AI to handle the task as quickly and well as they do, but even with many incoming calls at once. However, our goal is not to replace the operators. Voicebot will join them only when the number of incoming calls is beyond their powers,” adds Ťupa.
The digital assistant should get involved in helping people from a server in Ostrava. “We want the AI operator to work without it having to run on dozens of instances just in case a large number of people suddenly call on the emergency line. In an ideal situation, the voicebot will run in a single instance and will be able to copy itself if needed, so that no one will have to wait on the line,” outlines Ťupa.
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There are lots of minor improvements that may be added to the digital operator in the future. Thanks to them, it could, for example, sort a large number of data sentences into folders that will collect all the data from the same events together, and operation officers will not have to deal with that many duplicate data sentences. Voicebot could also use the caller’s GPS position to identify the affected objects and buildings. “For example, if the caller reports that the wind tore down the roof from the school building, the virtual assistant will see the map around the caller, identifying the right building without needing the exact address.” Explains Born Digital linguists Klára Vostřelová.
The project “Involvement of artificial intelligence in receiving emergency calls” is supported by the Czech Republic Ministry of the Interior from the Security Research Program — project number: VI20192022169. Born Digital participates in the research of the involvement of artificial intelligence for the reception of emergency calls together with the University of Mining in Ostrava, the Brno University of Technology, and SpeechTech and Phonexia companies.
About Born Digital
The Czechoslovak startup Born Digital was established in 2019 when it became independent of the parent company GoodAI and moved from research to the application sphere. The company focuses its attention on the development of AI voicebots and chatbots for Czech and Slovak, as well as other world languages. Born Digital solutions in the Czech Republic and Slovakia are used in everyday practice by, for example, the main mobile operator, banks, domestic and foreign energy distributors, and more. Born Digital voice assistants are called by thousands of people a day and have so far made more than 2.5 million calls to real customers.
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