Law enforcement officers rely on 911 telecommunicators to get them the right information quickly. In the world of understaffed emergency communications centers, depleted budgets and outdated technology, there are a variety of pitfalls agencies must deal with.

Two companies at the forefront of technology — Axon and Motorola Solutions — have both made recent announcements and acquisitions based around 911 call handling and dispatch. OFFICER Magazine was briefed on the news at Axon Week in Nashville and the Motorola Solutions Summit in Orlando this past spring, where both companies touted initiatives they hope will help alleviate the burden placed on call handlers.

Axon 911

Michael Chime, who now leads Axon 911, which leverages Prepared — the Assistive AI for emergency communications he founded — along with cloud-based call handling platform Carbyne, spoke at the opening of Axon Week on how the new platform plans to cover the full emergency communications lifecycle, from the call to case closure.

“We ought to live in a world where the best technology exists in the places where it matters most. Right now, any one of us can open up our browser, type ChatGPT into a URL, and we have access to technology that’s a thousand times more capable than someone handling a 911 call,” he says. “We’ve brought together some of the most forward-leaning innovators of the 911 space and united them with a company that, from its founding, believed there was a better way to do things, a better way to protect life. Now, we turn our attention to where it begins: the call.”

Axon 911 provides cloud-native voice, text and video call handling while making 911 data more accessible. Incident data flows seamlessly into downstream systems including real-time operations, drone response, digital evidence and records to improve response, preserve critical information and streamline case management.

“We see 911 changing in two fundamental ways. One, AI will simply make people better. This isn’t just a slogan. We’re seeing this in real time. It’s not replacing them; it’s amplifying them. AI can do things they couldn’t do on their own. Things like speaking 30 languages or absorbing call volumes that would overwhelm the center previously,” says Chime. “Second, AI is going to force us to modernize the infrastructure underneath. This is a point that we don’t commonly think about, but public safety has been slow to adopt the Cloud. With AI, the urgency has never been greater. Here’s how I think about it. Think of AI as a Ferrari. It’s fast; it’s powerful, but I don’t think you should drive a Ferrari on a dirt road. You need a highway first. With Axon’s acquisition of Carbyne, we bought the world’s leading cloud-based call handling and brought it to Axon 911. They will be that highway. They’re the best in the world at it. But that’s just the beginning of this modernization effort. We plan to bring all of your core systems in 911 to the cloud.”

According to Chime, Axon 911’s goal is to combine the best of AI to help call takers do their job better with a continuously growing suite of modern core infrastructure and build a future where an agency’s entire 911 center runs on a single intelligent platform. “Today, Prepared and Carbyne work with over 1,000 agencies across the country in several countries around the world processing over 80 million 911 calls a year, including some of the largest cities in the United States.”

In Fort Worth, Texas, Axon 911’s AI non-emergency call-taking software is already handling thousands of calls a month automatically. From a call coming in to completing that call for service. “In this world, non-emergency wait times literally drop to zero,” says Chime. “Dispatchers can stay focused on what matters, and agencies that are facing short staffing can offload more than a third of their call volume without a single additional headcount.”

In Baltimore, Axon 911’s AI translator has become the go-to solution for non-English calls, according to Chime. “There is no more hold button, no more, ‘Please wait while I find an interpreter.’ The dispatcher has what they need, and the response is already underway,” he says, adding that previously, a language barrier meant a long delay and a slower response. Axon 911 provides access to over 240 languages for translation.

“Finally, we’ve always believed that 911 was the center, and is the center, of an emergency. But historically, information stayed there; it didn’t travel,” he told the audience. “Today, in cities across the U.S., we’re changing that by ensuring that the moment the call comes in, that intelligence radiates out. It radiates out to drones, to Real Time Crime Centers, to any resource that needs it.”

Hyper and Assist Agents

Just days before the Motorola Solutions Summit, the company announced the acquisition of the AI-assisted non-emergency call handling platform Hyper. The company also announced that it is rolling out Assist Agents, which aim to help save time and increase the efficiency of an emergency response. The agents will focus on removing language barriers in real-time and helping guide call handlers through complex emergency scenarios in order to better support the incident. During the event, Ben Sanders, Founder and CEO Hyper, spoke to OFFICER Magazine about how being part of Motorola Solutions will help further advance his company’s mission.

“The reason we’re excited to work with Motorola Solutions is we couldn’t keep up with all of the interest and demand,” he says. “Joining Motorola Solutions is going to help us just accelerate that and plug into technology like call handling and CAD. If there’s any call that comes through that is a non-emergency through the 10-digit admin line that actually escalates to an emergency, we can hand that over to call handling, and we’ll be able, through integrations, to send information from the call directly to the call handler’s screen.”

According to Sanders, half of the calls that come into 911 centers are for non-emergencies. “If a call handler is busy on one of those, they’re unable to answer the next call that might come in. That could be an emergency call. That’s a problem because for that call, for an emergency call, every second matters,” he says. “What Hyper does is help automatically resolve the non-emergency calls, which are sometimes 60% of the total call volume. That allows the emergency call to get answered much faster. That helps save time, save lives and improves the wellness for the staff that are overstretched and overworked.”

The Hyper AI voice agent is already being used today by some of the largest 911 call centers in Canada and the United States, including the Toronto Police Department and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office.

“Hyper’s agentic AI is helping us better manage high volumes of non-emergency calls and reduce the strain put on our call handlers and dispatchers,” Ashish Kakkad, Chief Information Officer at the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, said in a statement when the acquisition was announced. “By automating the routing of non-emergency calls, our telecommunicators can focus more of their time on emergency situations that require judgment, empathy and critical thinking. It’s a practical use of technology that improves outcomes for our community.”

Sanders gave the example of waking up to find out that someone broke into your car overnight. He says that many people will Google “police” and call the 10-digit phone number provided instead of calling 911. Once through the phone tree, they don’t realize it, but they often end up getting connected to the same 911 call handler, just in the secondary queue. “Some agencies, prior to Hyper, had 6-hour, 12-hour waits on their non-emergency queue,” he says.

With Hyper’s integration with Motorola Solutions’ software, the information will be available in VESTA NXT, the company’s call handling software. “Instead of a call handler having to start from scratch when a call is handed off, they’ll be able to confirm some of the information that’s already there, which will save time,” he says. “Similarly, there are call types that don’t need human intervention that can go straight to dispatch if you can send them to CAD. Now that we’re part of Motorola, we’ll be able to integrate there and do that as well.”

Another benefit of Hyper’s AI agent, according to Sanders, is the ability to take over online reporting. “Now that we are building the integration directly to CAD, you don’t need to send people to a form. We can get all the information over the phone,” he says. “Why send someone a link, maybe they’re not on a cell phone, maybe they’re not tech savvy. They’re already there; why not get that information that way?”

Motorola Solutions is touting the rollout of Assist Agents as a way help give first responders more time to save more lives. Sanders says this is something that has his team excited. “Even though Hyper is focused on non-emergency call agents, we’re part of a team now that’s going to be building lots of different AI agents as part of Assist to help with interpreter agents, translating and all sorts of things. This is just the start of what we’re going to be able to do.”