Motorola Solutions launches AI-powered virtual-assistant software to aid 911 telecommunicators

Motorola Solutions recently announced the launch of VESTA NXT, which includes “virtual response assistant” technology that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) that can reduce the workload of a 911 call handler by an estimated 20% to 35%, according to a company press release about the offering.

Dan Twohig, Motorola Solutions’ vice president of strategic partnerships, said that cloud-enabled VESTA NXT utilizes AI technology in a manner that is designed to enhance the ability of 911 telecommunicators to focus on the key decision-making part of their jobs while using their existing VESTA tools.

“The announcement … is focused on a set of capabilities that we’re calling 9-1-1 Assist that augments those products,” Twohig said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It utilizes conversational AI to enhance the workflow to make better decisions faster, smarter and more effectively to try to shrink the response time in a way that’s simple, easy to understand, ergonomic and fits with the workflow they know.

“What you’re seeing here is integrated. So, the ability for you to leverage the capabilities of AI that makes the product that you know better is not a leap to the future. It feels natural, and it’s almost like a light touch, in the way that it’s not throwing a lot of new information at you that you can’t process in the moment. We know that the market will not utilize this, if it is not easy to use … It can’t be more distracting.”

Jehan Wickramasuriya, Motorola Solutions’ corporate vice president for AI and intelligence platforms, echoed this sentiment, noting the company’s familiarity with the public-safety workflow—beginning with emergency calls fielded by 911 centers—allows for more effective integration of AI.

“Their VESTA is essentially enhanced, in many ways, from a usability perspective and a user-experience perspective,” Wickramasuriya said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We don’t apply spot AI—we don’t put AI in disparate pieces. We really focus on making it part of the workflow. It’s just a more seamless experience; it feels natural with what they are doing. It’s not an AI story; it’s a user-experience story.

With 911 Assist, the VESTA system not only provides smart transcription of the interaction between the 911 caller and the telecommunicator, but it also generates an ever-evolving summary of this information—as well as other calls related to the same incident—that can be accessed by others involved in the response, Wickramasuriya said.

“Assist is basically the glue that sits inside our call-handling [solution] that bridges the rest of the workflow into things like dispatch,” Wickramasuriya said. “And you can imagine that this glue will exist between all of the applications in our suite of response workflow. This is just the beginning of the workflow with 911.”

And information gathered about an incident via VESTA NXT is more easily shared with others involved in the response—without placing an additional burden on telecommunicators, who traditionally have had to spend time providing information via voice communications that now can be accessed automatically, Wickramasuriya said.

“A lot of dispatchers’ time is spent on fairly rudimentary things—and usually repeating them over and over again,” he said. “This is where we think AI can really help, because it essentially democratizes that information and makes it available in parallel—through our mobile app, through our APX NEXT radio—so that I have access to that information, no matter where I am in that workflow.

Wickramasuriya said Motorola Solutions wants public safety to leverage the benefits of all video and IoT sensor data but recognizes that all these inputs ideally would not be fielded and processed by 911 telecommunicators, who should be focused on the fundamental information gathering associated with an emergency call.

One example of this is a school that shares real-time video with a public-safety operations center during an incident, according to Wickramasuriya.

“In a PSAP, we don’t believe the thing that the telecommunicator needs is to put a bunch of different cameras in front of them,” he said. “They need to stay focused on the ‘Who?’ ‘What?’ ‘Where?’ ‘When?’ and the safety considerations [associated with a 911 call], but those information sources are piped into parts of the workflow that are relevant.

“So, cameras and video may be integrated with the real-time operations center, where you have people who are looking at that video as a primary means to tackle a complex incident.”

Todd Piett, corporate vice president of command center technologies at Motorola Solutions, highlighted the importance of such integration.

“When a person dials 9-1-1, a call handler is inundated with a deluge of data they need to process and verify in seconds before a dispatcher can send out help,” Piett said in a prepared statement. “We’ve brought the entire call-handling workflow under one platform and applied thoughtful design and AI to help sort, surface and synthesize key knowledge. VESTA NXT bridges the information divide between call handler and dispatcher.”

John Jokantas, director of Hancock County 9-1-1 in Indiana, agreed, noting telecommunicators’ desire to leverage all available information about a situation while still making quick decisions to launch the appropriate response.

“During an emergency, so many members of the community want to help, which is an amazing thing,” Jokantas said in a prepared statement. “Yet all this information places the call handler under a lot of stress to process it and act quickly without missing a key detail.

“Fewer clicks, fewer tabs and not needing to dig for information frees up a call handler to be more present for that caller in their moment of need.”