New Orleans Now Has AI Answering 911 Calls: Many Say It's a Bad Idea

New Orleans has become the first city in the US to use artificial intelligence to answer 911 emergency calls. However, critics warn that this practice could have deadly consequences, writes New York Post.

Orleans Parish's communications service, which handles over a thousand calls daily and is among the busiest in the country, routes calls to artificial intelligence. It decides which calls to forward to operators and which to handle internally.

"I've been a 911 dispatcher for eleven years and this is the worst idea ever," said user Boxy, who identified himself as an emergency services worker.

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The new system, called AI Emergency Call Triage, was rolled out in Louisiana's largest city in late July after testing on the 311 line.

As the publication explains, the algorithm analyzes calls and determines priorities: which situations require immediate human intervention, and which can be classified as repeat or less urgent, so as not to overload dispatchers.

Orleans Parish Communications Executive Director Karl Fasold emphasized that the system does not replace human operators. He said the AI ​​is primarily used when callers are approximately 200 meters away from an already reported incident or when all operators are busy.

However, critics fear possible dire consequences.

"There are situations when a person can't speak clearly, has a strong accent, or is in a dangerous situation, such as a domestic violence situation, and is trying to disguise a call as a pizza order. You need to be able to pick up on emotions and understand what's not being said directly," noted the same user, Boxy, whose profile features a photo of himself in an emergency services uniform. "That's where you need a human."

New Orleans appears to have become the first major city in the country to use artificial intelligence to actually answer emergency calls.

Other cities, such as Atlanta and Seattle, are already using AI technologies, but in a more limited form.

In Atlanta, artificial intelligence is helping dispatchers quickly locate callers.

In Seattle, a similar system has been in use since 2024 to assess the urgency of calls and prioritize responses. According to a Seattle Times investigation, it has been in use for over two years without public announcement.

However, the reliability of such systems raises questions. According to several studies, voice AI systems perform unstable.

In February, a study found that systems like ChatGPT and Gemini generate false information and present it in a convincing voice in almost half of the cases, according to Newsguard.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that people calling 911 are rarely calm and clear; their speech can be slurred and difficult to understand. Critics argue that this only increases the risk of errors.

Furthermore, voice AI systems remain vulnerable to external attacks and can develop hidden biases based on training data. Cybersecurity researchers from Zhejiang University demonstrated that the behavior of such models can be deliberately modified with success rates ranging from 79% to 96%. These results were presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May.

Among other things, experts demonstrated the possibility of hacking such systems from the outside: in a series of tests, they were able to force voice models to work incorrectly with a probability of up to 96%.

However, New Orleans officials say they are confident the system will be effective, provided it has human oversight, high-quality training data, robust cybersecurity, and algorithmic regulation.

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