New Orleans is now the first city in the United States to deploy artificial intelligence for handling emergency 911 calls, a landmark move that supporters say could ease pressure on dispatchers — and critics warn could put lives at risk.
The Orleans Parish Communication District, which receives more than 1,000 emergency calls a day and ranks among the nation’s busiest 911 centers, has begun sending some calls to an AI agent that determines whether they should be escalated to a human dispatcher or managed by the automated system, the Shreveport Times reported.
“I was a 911 dispatcher for 11 years and this is the worst idea you could possibly think of,” wrote one online critic using the name Boxy, who claimed to be a first responder.
The technology, called AI Emergency Call Triage, was launched in Louisiana’s largest city in late July after first being tested through the city’s 311 non-emergency hotline.
According to the Times, the system reviews incoming calls and helps identify which emergencies require immediate attention from human operators, while the bot manages lower-priority calls or repeat reports to keep dispatchers from being overwhelmed.
OPCD Executive Director Karl Fasold has stressed that the AI system is not intended to replace human dispatchers. He told local CBS affiliate WWL-TV that it will primarily be used when a caller is within about 200 meters of a crash that has already been reported and when all human call-takers are tied up.
Still, opponents say even a limited role for AI in 911 operations could carry dangerous, potentially fatal consequences.
“You have scenarios where the person can’t speak well [or have strong accents] — or if they’re in a domestic situation and they pretend to call for pizza or something — you have to be able to determine how someone feels or pick up on what they aren’t saying,” said Boxy, whose profile photo appeared to show him wearing a first responder uniform.
“You need a person.”
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New Orleans appears to be the first major municipality in the country to allow AI to actually answer emergency calls.
However, others — such as Atlanta and Seattle — have also integrated AI into their 911 systems in lesser forms.
Atlanta uses AI to help live dispatchers locate callers faster, according to CBS News.
Meanwhile, Seattle started using a similar tech in 2024 to help dispatchers decide which callers deserve a rapid response and which don’t — using it for over two years without disclosing it to the public, according to an investigation by the Seattle Times.
But AI’s track record on accuracy, especially when it comes to voice chatting, is sketchy at best, according to multiple studies.
In February, one study found that bots like ChatGPT and Gemini made up false information nearly half the time, delivering it in audio that sounded convincing, according to data collected by Newsguard.
Complicating it more is the fact that people calling 911 are rarely calm, coherent or easy to understand. Critics warn that only increases the risk for misunderstanding.
AI voice systems are also persistently vulnerable to outside attacks and could even develop hidden biases based on the data it’s fed, with cybersecurity researchers successfully manipulating the voice model’s behavior with an average success rate between 79% and 96%, according to security researchers from China’s Zhejiang University, presented during May’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Security researchers have also managed to hack these systems from the outside, tricking voice models into misbehaving with a success rate as high as 96% in some tests.
Still, officials in New Orleans said they strongly believe that with human oversight, thorough training data, strong cybersecurity and algorithm regulation, the AI 911 bot could work effectively.
