An Upcoming Way to Contact 911

[Deleted member 111282]

I recently came across this interesting article. This woman is trying to make 911 available to the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community, as well as non-English speakers, as her family falls into both categories. It's awesome she's turned this into her purpose in life.

The article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/fastfo...mergency-help-accessible-through-text-to-911/

The woman's site: http://911text.app/

Although it is already possible to text 911 dispatchers, the problem is the dispatch technology needs to be updated in order to accommodate it, and while it's been worked on, its limited to certain areas

 

[anneranch]

As a small tidbit contribution - when the largest county in Washington state went to "e-911" - to provide the dispatchers with a caller address - the phone company used lonely Epson pc to convert the "long distance caller ID" to address. Long way around the barn but it worked...


The county had a "two layer " approach to answer the 911 call - fist answered by dispatcher who then passed the call to another , appropriate dispatcher - fire , police etc.
The catch was - the caller should never be "put on hold " - hence the stadard "call transfer" would not do.
So the current , state of the art computerized PBX had to be modified accordingly - in software.


911 systems are nice usage of tecchnology , but IMHO the key to good 911 service is still held by the human answering the calls.
Seldom publicly appreciated - so here it is


THANKS for your service

 

[Deleted member 111282]

As a small tidbit contribution - when the largest county in Washington state went to "e-911" - to provide the dispatchers with a caller address - the phone company used lonely Epson pc to convert the "long distance caller ID" to address. Long way around the barn but it worked...

The county had a "two layer " approach to answer the 911 call - fist answered by dispatcher who then passed the call to another , appropriate dispatcher - fire , police etc.
The catch was - the caller should never be "put on hold " - hence the stadard "call transfer" would not do.
So the current , state of the art computerized PBX had to be modified accordingly - in software.

That's interesting to know