The city of El Cajon is now using a new artificial intelligence system to answer non-emergency calls to police, aimed at reducing hold times for callers and alleviating the volume of calls on dispatchers.

The El Cajon Police Department estimates the agency receives 180,000 calls a year, with 100,000 of those classified as non-emergencies, like animal or noise complaints, parking issues, building permit requests, power outages and more.

“Unfortunately, the police department kind of becomes the catch-all for anything, right? Like if somebody doesn’t know who to call it, they kind of default to the police department,” said Craig Groll, the department’s communications manager. “So we needed a way to help the dispatchers so that they can focus on the emergency calls.”

With just 17 dispatchers answering those calls day and night, starting citywide on Wednesday, the police department began using tech company Aurelian’s AI system – known as Ava – to screen those non-emergency calls.

911 calls are still routed directly to a human dispatcher. But the non-emergency calls are now answered by Ava, which takes the caller’s report, gathers key information and then puts it into the computer system to be reviewed by a dispatcher.

“Every single call gets touched by a human,” Groll said. “Humans are reviewing each call for accuracy. Humans are reviewing each call for priority and triaging.”

The department said the intent is to eliminate hold times for those non-emergency calls and to alleviate some of the burden on dispatchers.

“You might take a very highly charged or highly emotional call of somebody pleading for help or somebody in a life-threatening situation, right? And you don’t have that time to decompress because you’re on to the next call,” said Groll. “So anything we can do to help give them a little bit of a break and a little bit of a time for decompression in between some of those calls, and focus more so on the emergency calls versus some of the lower priority type calls, is really what we’re looking for.”

Ava also automatically translates in Spanish and Arabic, the department said.

“When someone calls our non-emergency line, they should get through right away,” Chief Jeremiah Larson said in a statement. “Whether they speak English, Spanish or Arabic, they will get help in their preferred language. This system will improve the caller experience and will help our employees be more efficient in the process.”

The police department now has a one-year contract with Aurelian for $74,000. The agency said it has no plans to replace any people and will review Ava’s performance before possibly renewing next year. The department also said El Cajon is the first city in California to use Aurelian.