The Lyon County Emergency Communication Center’s newest call handler has been busy since coming online earlier this month.
That’s according to LCECC Director Roxanne Van Gundy during a recent appearance on KVOE’s Morning Show, where she discussed the integration of Betty, a non-emergency AI call handling system that became active locally at the start of December. Van Gundy says the purpose of Betty was to help alleviate the number of non-emergency calls being handled by human dispatchers, thus giving them a “Moment to breathe” and be more prepared and focused to handle emergencies that come through the center.
Though she has only been online a few weeks, Van Gundy says Betty has spent a significant amount of time interacting with residents, having already handled more than 20 hours or better than 1,200 calls as of Friday morning. With these numbers in mind, Van Gundy says the process has been smooth thus far, noting it took some time to get the system up and running, likening the process to training a traditional dispatcher.
This is month one of a four-month pilot program for Betty locally, after which time the center will evaluate several metrics in order to gauge whether or not they would like to make her a permanent resource.
The ongoing pilot program was developed in cooperation between the county and Toronto, Canada and San Francisco-based tech startup Hyper, which specializes in developing AI non-emergency call handling systems. For more information on Hyper and their work, visit callhyper.com.
