HELL YEAH. I love those dudes, especially Perkins. That’s a dude that loved D&D and you could tell how much he cared about its success.

Having Hasbro/WotC slowly choking the game and becoming so money hungry probably drove them away.

What is Compuserve

I design call centers for my job, we have an AI bot that can handle non emergency calls and what you said at the end is how we do it.

911 calls always start with a person, and the dispatcher can make the determination to transfer to the non-emergency bot. Y’all get too many calls that aren’t actual emergencies tbh.

Edit: I looked up Versaterm’s solution, CallTriage, and it’s important to note that the AI isn’t for 911 calls, it’s for non-emergency line calls only. The article is conflating the non-emergency calls with 911 calls for shock value.

Edit: I’m pretty sure the article is just going for shock value, and a lot of the commenters are getting baited. The City isn’t looking to make 911 calls go to an AI. It’s people who call the non-emergency line.

I design call centers (including for PubSec) for a living. We have a service offering for a non-emergency 911 bot. It’s honestly not even that new of a feature, it was around before the generative AI boom. Dispatch Centers are chronically understaffed, the job is hella stressful, there’s a lot of attrition and training new employees takes a lot of time because the calls can be sensitive or complex.

There is a pretty defined split in different cities (I mostly do state & local govt, not federal) in terms of who wants AI and who despises it. Some folks that lead dispatch groups are VERY adamant that everything needs to be a person, they often have big egos because their call center is “the most important” in any city.

And yeah, we’ve implemented the non emergency 911 bot for customers before. Our design starts with an agent though, and if the agent makes the determination that it’s not an emergency, they transfer the call over to the automated line. Btw, roughly half of all calls into a 911 center are actual “emergencies”. So they get a shit ton of calls they don’t need to, my guess is just because 911 is easy to remember and a non emergency line isn’t, I feel like we need another 3 digit line for “not life and death but still important” calls.

Goddamn I listened to DC Talk a lot as a kid, growing up in a Christian home. Didn’t follow his solo career but listened to TobyMac, who was also in DC Talk. Pretty crazy news for that world.