By Donny Jackson
RapidSOS has announced two platforms—Unite and Harmony—that are designed to help 911 centers address personnel shortages and stress challenges by leveraging numerous available data points quickly and automating some of the more mundane tasks associated with emergency calls and digital alerts.
RapidSOS CEO Michael Martin emphasized that the new capabilities integrated in the Unite and Harmony offerings—many of which are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and expected to be available later this year—are designed to ease and enhance the work being done by 911 telecommunicators, not replace them.
“We constantly marvel at the ability of humans to rapidly assess and manage the most challenging situations,” Martin said today during the company’s webinar. “Technology will never replace the talent, ingenuity and professionalism of public safety.
“But we do believe that artificial intelligence is a tool that can support that life-saving work, similar to how a copilot helps the captain in a challenging landing, monitoring all of the periphery sensors and feeding only the most important information—at the right time—to the skilled pilot’s landing.”
This sentiment is the inspiration for Harmony, which Martin described as the “AI copilot for public safety.”. Harmony is powered by a large-language model that is designed to support 911 and first responders, so it should improve the more it is used, he said.
“Harmony is built to learn alongside you,” Martin said. “It won’t be perfect initially, but it will be the most attentive student you’ve ever had … Harmony learns and adapts based on real-time information, validating data against other RapidSOS sensor feeds and data sources.
“The first step with Harmony will be continuing to automate the most mundane and repetitive tasks. But we are working step 2, where we’re beginning to leverage RapidSOS’s network of sensors to help raise key insights under the surface while your team manages that core response.”
As an example, Martin presented the scenario of a car accident in which two automated calls are made to 911—one from a vehicle and another from a wearable worn by a driver.
“Each device is part of the puzzle—accident severity, driver’s condition, driver’s health profile and that the vehicle is electric,” Martin said. “Harmony is able to decipher those data points and—in real time, while your team is speaking to the driver—immediately surface that the vehicle is electric and overheating, and that the driver has a history of severe medical condition, escalating both fire and EMS response.”
In the future, RapidSOS functionalities can help ease the work burden on 911 telecommunicators, according to Martin.
“We’ll use AI, so that the mundane work is automated,” he said. “Repetitive work goes away, and you can focus on what you [public-safety personnel] do best—responding to emergencies and saving lives.
“Expect a lot more from RapidSOS Harmony in the coming months and years.”
Karin Marquez, chief public-safety brand officer for RapidSOS, said that RapidSOS Unite represents a rebranding of the company’s existing services—Portal and Premium—into a single system that includes new capabilities.
“RapidSOS Unite addresses the need for a flexible ecosystem that contains both our no-cost capabilities and an expanded suite of paid modules,” Marquez said during the company webinar. “What you know and love will still be there—no functionality is being removed. For those of you who have Premium, we’re expanding the modules and capabilities to give you more freedom to customize to your needs. With Unite, we start by centralizing workflows and data for all means of communication that you need to handle in an emergency response.
“What this means is that all of your emergencies are now on one master map, with a redundant connection to your citizen’s phone, so you can see who is calling. Even if phones are down during an attack or a natural disaster, you can immediately message a caller, streamlining operations for hangup calls and reaching citizens in moments when they may not be to speak or when calling is down.”
In addition, RapidSOS Unite also will let public safety leverage video inputs to improve responses, Marquez said.
“Sometimes, a picture or video can provide the full situational awareness that you need to dispatch the right units and protect your responders,” Marquez said. “We’re excited to share the work we’ve been doing over the past several years with public safety to integrate multimedia responsibly, using AI inside RapidSOS. For every call, you can see now see relevant, nearby security cameras. These feeds can come from over 10 million cameras that are now RapidSOS-enabled in your community.
“With one click, you can also request the caller to share their camera feed. All of this occurs only at 911’s request, with important safety features, like the ability to blur video.”
Will Robinson, quality-assurance lead at RapidSOS, noted that RapidSOS Unite includes four new modules that are designed to let public-safety agencies better utilize GIS, more smoothly handle translation, extend situational awareness to personnel in the field, and support single-sign-on functionality.
A fifth new module—known as Intelligent Analyst—is expected to help 911 centers handle high call volumes more efficiently, as well as support AI-powered forecasting.
“This is just the beginning,” Robinson said. “We’re going to continue working with you—our public-safety community—to expand these modules and continue to build the future of intelligent safety together.
“It’s exciting to see how these tools are going to operationalize billions of data points coming in from RapidSOS.”
