If a resident makes a non-emergency call to Boulder Police to report anything from abandoned vehicles to traffic and noise complaints, they’ll hear an AI agent pick up starting later this month.

About 70% of calls the Boulder Police and Fire Communication Center takes are not emergencies, according to Boulder Police spokesperson Dionne Waugh. That means human dispatchers are taking lots of calls about things that don’t need immediate attention. Enter: an Axon AI assistant meant to talk to callers and get their information to where police think it should go, according to the program’s website at bouldercolorado.gov/non-emergency-line-ai-assistant.

Starting at the end of October, after weeks of phased testing, anyone who calls the non-emergency line will hear a voice asking for information about why they’re calling, according to a demo video on that website. That voice, in the video, identified itself as “Ashley” and walked the caller through making his report on an abandoned vehicle.

The program itself is dubbed ANET, or Automated Non-Emergency Triage, the site says. ANET should help get people through a system that, until the end of this month, would prompt a caller to listen to all the options and dial a number to go to the right place, police say.

“This option will allow us to better serve everyone by giving them more time to focus on calls involving more serious threats of harm and violence to our community,” Police Chief Steve Redfearn wrote in a post on X announcing the change. “This will also still allow us to provide professional service to callers for lower-level priority calls that are important but can be handled by this technology.”

The AI assistant will not take any 911 calls, according to the website. But it will take all non-emergency calls, including the following:

• Abandoned vehicles.
• Traffic crashes with no injuries.
• Animal complaints with no threat to public safety.
• Cold cases with no suspect on the scene.
• Extra patrol requests.
• Fireworks complaints.
• Found property
• Lost property.
• Noise complaints.
• Parking complaints.
• Traffic complaints.

The agent will be able to converse in English and Spanish, and it will use natural language to act as though it were a person on the other end of the phone. Even in the staged demo, the caller says “sorry” to the AI once when he didn’t tell it the abandoned car was on a public street, as if he were talking to a person.

Anyone who doesn’t want to talk to an AI, though, can tell it that and be transferred to a flesh-and-bone dispatcher, according to the site.

Anyone who has a complaint or feedback on the new system can call the Police Department’s non-emergency line at 303-441-3333 and tell the AI — which they might be complaining about — that they want to lodge a complaint. Then ANET, or perhaps “Ashley,” will transfer that caller to a human dispatcher.

Calls will be recorded — and publicly accessible — the same way they were in the old system, but data in non-emergency calls will not be used by Axon to train the AI assistant, according to Waugh.

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