RapidSOS announces enhancements to platform, including AI-powered capabilities

RapidSOS today unveiled a series of enhancements to its RapidSOS Unite solution for 911 centers that will be available during the next several months, including capabilities enabled by the company’s Harmony artificial-intelligence (AI) technology that is designed to serve as a “co-pilot” to telecommunicators.

RapidSOS co-founder and CEO Michael Martin said the company developed the UNITE solution integrated with AI-powered Harmony to address needs expressed by 911 telecommunicators during the past five years.

“You’ve taught us about this challenge and iterated with us to build toward today—a day where we unify critical data feeds, caller communications, workflows and field responders on one AI-enabled platform [that is] interoperable with your existing systems,” Martin said today during a RapidSOS online special event. “RapidSOS Unite is that interoperable platform.

“Unite connects critical emergency data to 911 on an unmatched scale, from health profiles to vehicle telematics to train hazmat to weapons detection, in millions of camera feeds. UNITE delivers the right information to your teams at the right moment.”

Martin said that RapidSOS officials have worked with 911 professionals in an effort to identify the best ways to leverage AI capabilities that will be most helpful to telecommunicators.

“Over the past decade, we’ve noticed a common theme when talking with you [911 professionals]: So often, many of your actions are in service of your technology—another form you need to fill out, another manual copy and paste, another place to log into,” Martin said during the special event. “With every step you take, you have to bend to serve the needs of technology, all while performing the incredible work of serving the people in your communities in their moments of greatest need.

“It shouldn’t be like that. Instead, technology should be working in service of you—the talented 911 professionals—unlocking your empathy, your creativity, your critical thinking, your humanity. Just like accurate location was an unsolvable problem—until it wasn’t—this is the next big leap.”

Earlier this year, RapidSOS announced that it would use AI to help call centers handle a significant number of calls from residential and commercial alarms. Today’s announcement expands this capability by using Harmony’s AI to help address three key challenges for 911 centers:

Karin Marquez, chief public-safety brand officer for RapidSOS, emphasized that the goal of the new AI capabilities is not to replace 911 telecommunicators but to reduce their workloads. This should let them focus more on true emergency calls, she said.

“Each day, 911 telecommunicators are inundated with calls that are not emergencies and spend time answering calls about trash pickup, water-main breaks, or streetlight outages,” Marquez said in a prepared statement. “This is not where their time or attention is needed.

“Harmony cuts through all of the noise and allows the telecommunicators to focus on the incidents that require their highly trained skillset and human connection.”

RapidSOS Unite’s core features are free for 911 centers to use, but many of the AI-enabled will require additional payments, although the amount of the fees was not disclosed during today’s online special event.

During an interview yesterday with Urgent Communications, Martin said RapidSOS plans to make all of the new announced enhancements available to 911 centers by the end of the first quarter of 2025 or shortly thereafter. The transcription/translation and SOP integration capabilities are expected to be the first to be commercially available, Martin said during the online special event.

Martin explained that Harmony’s AI will be integrated into the RapidSOS Unite secure web application without requiring 911 centers to significantly bolster their bandwidth, processing or power capacities.

“All of the Harmony stuff is occurring in RapidSOS’s platform in the cloud, and then it is transferred down into the local agency—the specific, most-actionable data—in real time,” Martin said during the interview with Urgent Communications. “So, it should actually help minimize the bandwidth requirements for it.”