this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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You really don't need an AI for this though. With the number of mass shootings the US sees, it's honestly shocking that they don't have a button the operator can press to activate an auto-reply along the lines of "We are already responding to , if you still want to talk to us, press 1 or wait for a reply.", which waits something like 10s before going through.
This would filter out a bunch of duplicate reporting with far less effort, and with less odds of something going wrong.
You can't put a barrier between emergency services and someone in an emergency. Sometimes they literally don't have the ability to press 1.
Just overstaff your call center. That's it.
Spend a little extra money to ensure your emergency workers aren't stressed out 24x7, and they'll have the staff to manage a bigger event.
It's an emergency service. Spend money on it like it's important.
Which is why I'm saying it should go through automatically after a short delay.
It's easy to say "just over staff" until you're faced with the reality that maybe once every five years, for a grand total of one hour, you're faced with call pressure 1000 times higher than the second highest spike. It's not viable to staff a response center to deal with thousands of people calling in the same bomb attack or shooting within minutes, when you normally see on the order of hundreds of calls per week.
What you need is the capacity to deal with 99.99... % of situations, and a safety mechanism to prevent the remaining situations from overloading your system more than necessary.
In a mass casualty event, you need to be able to filter out the people making redundant reports in order to effectively handle the important reports. You need to do that without blocking out the important reports, that's the hard part.
This is actually a product intrado sells to places to handle overflow 911 calls, it’s been a Thing forever, unfortunately seems like municipalities are getting drunk on the AI kool-aid like everyone else 😢
100%
I watched a video about a guy building his own Stonehenge the other day. Using gravity and some cool techniques, the guy moves massive stones BY HIMSELF.
Meanwhile you have people so breathlessly stupid they think that the pyramids were built by aliens because "stone heavy, these people didn't have construction equipment!!!!!".
Modern tech does not mean solutions didn't exist before. We have forgotten so much in the name of selling products that a simple solution like yours goes overlooked in favor of fucking AI and a third party company that surely definitely cares about 911.