Toronto police will use AI to reduce wait times for non-emergency calls
Last year, a caller was disconnected after waiting 12 hours for an operator to answer her non-emergency call
The Toronto Police Service is set to implement an artificial intelligence system to handle non-emergency calls, says a new CBC report.
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Toronto’s emergency call wait times have been under scrutiny in recent years following complaints that callers were left on hold for long periods while trying to access emergency services. A January 2024 911 call had a wait time of 10 minutes and 58 seconds before an operator was able to get to it, reported Toronto Today. (Earlier this year, it was reported that wait times for the emergency line were down to three seconds.)
Last year, a caller waited 12 hours for a non-emergency-line operator to answer, but the call was disconnected.
“The adoption of this new technology should quite frankly make that null and void,” said Gregory Watts, a spokesperson for the Toronto police. “Because now everybody that calls the non-emergency line gets answered immediately by the AI system.”
The new AI service will cover non-emergency calls made to *877. According to the CBC, it’s similar to Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, which interact with users through automated voices.
Ben Sanders, the CEO of Hyper, which developed the AI system, told the CBC that it is safe and ready to be public-facing. “Unlike open-ended generative AI, Hyper operates within strict guardrails. It only provides answers grounded in agency-approved data, and if it can’t answer reliably, it hands the call to a human rather than risk giving incorrect information,” he said.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
