RapidSOS launches AI-powered Alarm Call Automation solution for 911 centers

RapidSOS last week announced its Alarm Call Automation solution, which uses the company’s Harmony artificial-intelligence (AI) platform to collect relevant information from residential and commercial alarms that typically report incidents to a non-emergency line, allowing telecommunicators to focus on 911 calls.

Karin Marquez, chief public-safety brand officer for RapidSOS, said that such alarm calls currently represent about 20% to 30% of the total call volume for a 911 center, and that figure is expected to increase with the proliferation of sensors and smart devices utilized in the marketplace.

“This is going to be leveraging AI to help with processing of alarm calls from monitoring centers,” Marquez said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “We’ll have this AI gathering all of that information, that accurate data [from the alarm]. It will have its prompts to ask all of the right questions that the [public-safety] agency requires, allowing the telecommunicators really to focus back on those priority, critical tasks that they need to do, whether it’s on a 911 line, listening to radio transmissions and responding  appropriately.”

This capability is particularly important as 911 centers throughout the U.S. struggle to find staff to fill positions during all shifts, Marquez said. By allowing Alarm Call Automation to address alarm calls made to 10-digit lines, telecommunicators can focus more time and energy on 911 emergency calls, she said.

Alarm Call Automation is designed to gather the same information from an alarm call that is collected today via a telecommunicator, according to Marquez.

“Essentially, it’s all of the information that a telecommunicator would process today,” she said. “So, that call is still going to come into that 10-digit line at the agency, and then Harmony—the AI copilot, so to speak—is going to answer that alarm call and is going to process it just like the telecommunicator would, because the agency determines the questions that AI asks.”

While the Harmony AI platform will collect data from the alarm, but dispatch decisions will remain with humans, Marquez said. Harmony “will publish that data to the telecommunicator, so they can view it, verify it, and choose how they’re going to either dispatch or [determine] if any other additional tasks are needed,” Marquez said.

Being able to process this alarm-call information efficiently is significant, because the number of alarm calls could increase significantly in the future. In fact, Frost & Sullivan predicts that more than 50% of all 911 calls in 2027 will be triggered by a connected device, sensor or app, according to a RapidSOS press release.

This offering also could help 911 centers and public-safety agencies better recognize the full context of alarm calls, which historically generated a very high percentage of responses to false alarms, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). But augmenting the alarm-call information with other data from the geographical area of the incident can help public safety make better resource decisions, Marquez said.

“When we put it [alarm-call information] into the RapidSOS interface, we’re sourcing other information that’s happening at the time,” Marquez said. “If you think about looking at the map with RapidSOS data, we can start to see 911 calls or other incidents and events around where an alarm may be.

“We also could see location from agencies that have Axon body-worn camera location turned on. So, if there is somebody running from the police and you see the Axon body-worn camera location and an alarm at the same time, that can start to inform the telecommunicator whether it could be related to that [alarm] incident.”

RapidSOS has tested its Alarm Call Automation technology with 911 centers, and the solution is available to be operational within weeks of ordering, according to Marquez.

Attendees of the APCO 2024 event in Orlando can learn more about Alarm Call Automation and other RapidSOS offerings by visiting company representatives in Booth #1638 during exhibit-hall hours on Monday and Tuesday.