Overloaded emergency lines? Artificial intelligence helps with the solution

"I want to report a fire, my house is on fire!" It is like a scene cut straight out of a 911 call. However, now imagine what would follow immediately after a major fire in a shopping centre. In the first phase, there would be dozens, maybe even hundreds, of calls that would overload the emergency lines in no time. Other callers wanting to report, for example, traffic accidents, fallen trees, and a flooded basement will have to wait. "These are the very reasons why we are developing the new system. The voicebot is certainly not intended to replace operators on emergency lines, but rather to increase capacity in the event of a large number of calls to operations centres. Voicebots could thus prove useful during major natural disasters, such as floods and tornadoes," explains Petr Berglowiec, the Project Manager from the Faculty of Safety Engineering at the Technical University of Ostrava.

The voicebot will communicate with the caller just as if there was a human operator on the other end. It will listen to the caller and, if necessary, ask for further details necessary for the emergency services to arrive. The process then continues in a standard way: the dialogue between the caller and the operator is translated into a so-called data sentence. Imagine this as a series of abbreviated information about the event, so that the emergency services know exactly where to go and what to expect at the scene site.

"Due to the dozens of different types of incidents that emergency lines receive, we have begun profiling our voicebot for fires to verify that our path was viable. In the next phase of the project, we will focus on events related to the natural phenomena - particularly wind. We need to develop the system in such a way that the voicebot asks the right questions at the right time and that the dialogue produces data sentences according to a fixed structure. In short, exactly as firefighters need them," comments Václav Svatoň from IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, whose task is to develop and operate the entire voicebot system.

A team of 38 people from several institutions is working on the development of the voicebot. In addition to IT4Innovations, there is the Faculty of Safety Engineering of VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, the Faculty of Information Technology of the Brno University of Technology and three other partners - Phonexia, BornDigital, and SpeechTech companies, which deal with text analysis, speech recognition, and synthesis. The project, amounting to almost CZK 30 million, will be completed in mid-2022.

However, it is not certain whether we will then hear the robot in the receiver. "Our goal is to show that we have a working solution that could serve the integrated rescue system well. This is a research project to illustrate that our system is feasible. We would certainly be very happy if the voicebot is eventually used in the future. However, the decision will be up to the emergency services that operate the emergency lines," adds Petr Berglowiec.

The first version of the voicebot, which will be able to handle calls concerning fires, will be ready by the holidays. The implementation team will then work on extending it to other types of events.

The Employment of Artificial Intelligence into an emergency call reception project is funded by the Ministery of Interior of the Czech Republic (MI CR) from the Security Research programme of the MI CR – project ID is VI20192022169“ with a total of approximately CZK 29 mil.