AI Is Now Screening Some 911 Calls in New Orleans — and It’s Raising Questions

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AI is everywhere. You genuinely cannot turn on your phone or computer and spend five minutes browsing around without running into some form of AI tech. Some of it is useful. Some of it is… not.

Regardless of how you feel personally, it’s been made abundantly clear certain powerful companies plan to incorporate AI into as many aspects of their businesses as they can. The potential replacement of human workers has many people on edge… so when a report recently surfaced that the city of New Orleans was using “AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human,” it caused a bit of an uproar.

Turns out, the initial reaction may have been misguided. Let’s take a look at how New Orleans is really using AI, and what it can tell us about where technology might be headed in the next few years.

Does New Orleans Use AI to Screen 911 Calls?

In late July, the Shreveport Times ran a story claiming that the city of New Orleans had replaced the humans answering 911 calls with AI. The story was quickly corrected, but not before major national news outlets had picked it up. Before long, the internet was abuzz with the idea that someone in Louisiana might call the emergency line and be answered not by a human voice, but by a robot.

Turns out, the story and its headline were misleading. New Orleans city officials have now clarified that anyone calling the city’s 911 hotline will still find their call answered by a human agent… except in a very specific circumstance.

How AI 911 Calls Really Work in New Orleans

Essentially, there’s only one way someone in New Orleans would find themselves talking to an AI agent after placing a 911 call. Here’s how it works: if someone calls 911 within 200 feet of a vehicle crash that has already been reported, they may be routed to an AI agent only if no human dispatchers are available.

“The AI tells the caller they have reached New Orleans 911 and asks if they are calling about the accident at (location),” reads an explainer from the Orleans Parish Communication District. “If the caller responds with anything other than ‘YES’ (in any language), they are returned to the 911 call queue to speak with a human. If the caller responds ‘Yes,’ the AI advises that we are aware of the accident and tells the caller that if the caller is involved in the crash or has further information to provide, the caller should stay on the line. Otherwise, they may hang up.”

Why People Are Concerned

Clearly, this use of AI is very limited and can only be triggered in very specific circumstances. Still, new technology is a slippery slope. Even though the initial headline claiming New Orleans was answering emergency calls with AI turned out to be an overstatement, the reaction to it shows how apprehensive people still are about the ongoing AI takeover.

AI clearly has great uses. But the tech is not perfect, as anyone who has made a Google search recently could tell you. And if we can’t trust AI to do something as simple as find you information on the internet, trusting it with something as important as communication during an emergency is a bridge too far for many people.