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Council reviews renewal of automated nonemergency call system amid AI security and user‑experience concerns
Summary
Laurie Pesci briefed committees on renewing the Aurelien automated nonemergency‑call system; staff said it handles nonemergent routing for most of the county, there are QA meetings with the vendor, and a COG board meeting will gather further feedback; members raised security questions about AI vendors and asked for additional briefings.
The Public Safety committee revisited a renewal resolution for a master services agreement with Needle Inc., doing business as Aurelien, to process nonemergency calls using automated voice assistance for Summit County public safety answering points. Laurie Pesci of the Executive’s Department of Public Safety said the system, implemented a year ago, handles nonemergency routing for the combined center (SCCC) that covers most of the county and reduces dispatcher workload.
Pesci said approximately 90 percent of the county currently uses the system and staff meet weekly with the vendor for quality assurance and tuning. She acknowledged user complaints that some callers got caught in conversational loops and described a change in the prompt script and system tuning to ask callers to “talk to me as if you’re talking to a live person” so the system can understand utterances more reliably. Pesci said callbacks and text messages can be generated by the system and that dispatchers review calls routed through the system.
Committee members pressed on the vendor’s security posture and whether the vendor platform is hosted on major cloud services. One committee member referenced recent AI security research and asked staff to brief the council on vendor security and any new vendor‑evaluation protocols; staff agreed to gather feedback, noted a COG board public meeting on April 29 to solicit comment, and reminded members that the contract contains a 60‑day termination clause but that unwinding operational integration will take longer.
The committee moved the item back to the agenda for third reading with the request for additional briefings and community outreach.
