A Yorkshire police force has launched an "AI assistant" on its website to reduce the number of non-emergency 101 calls it receives.
What Bobbi does
South Yorkshire Police said the Bobbi chatbot can be used for advice and answers about non-emergency incidents. It cannot be used to report a crime, and is not an alternative to 999.
Ch Supt Cherie Buttle said the force receives more than 1,000 calls to 101 each day, and that some callers wait 20 minutes or more at busy times.
"I also recognise some people will have concerns around the use of AI, and I want to emphasise that Bobbi is a secure system. It is an alternative to, not a replacement, for some 101 calls," she said.
The system answers using information provided by the force itself, rather than scouring the internet as general assistants do. Hampshire & Isle of Wight, Thames Valley and Humberside forces have already deployed it. In August the force also began using AI to triage 101 calls, weeding out misdirected and nuisance calls.
What it means in Bangladesh
Of everything in today's news, this is the thing a Bangladeshi agency could build next month — and the thing most likely to be built badly.
Bangladesh runs 999 as a single national emergency number, and it works far better than most people expected when it launched. It is also carrying everything, because there is no 101 equivalent — no number for "my neighbour's construction is illegal", "I need a police clearance certificate", "what do I do about a lost phone". All of that arrives at the emergency line, competing with road accidents.
So the Bangladeshi version of this problem is worse than South Yorkshire's, and the fix is the same shape. A chatbot that answers procedural questions — which thana, which form, what documents, what fee, how long — removes a large share of calls without touching anything urgent.
Two design decisions from this deployment should be copied exactly, and they are the unglamorous ones. First, the assistant answers only from the force's own information, not from the open internet. A police chatbot that improvises a procedure is worse than no chatbot, and a general model asked about Bangladeshi police process will improvise confidently. Second, it cannot take a report. Keeping the reporting path human is what prevents an automated system from absorbing a complaint that needed a person.
The part that will not transfer without work is language. A procedural assistant for Bangladesh has to work in Bangla, including the way people actually write it — mixed script, local terms, no standard spelling of a thana name. That is the hard engineering, and it is the only part that determines whether the thing is used.
The staffing argument behind automation in public services is in the care robot story.
