A UK woman recently found out that it might not be the best idea to rely on your phone’s digital voice assistant to make an emergency call.
While trying to report a car accident in Barnstaple, Devon, UK, Theresa Saunders used her Windows phone’s voice assistant – Cortana – to find the local police number.
Cortana did indeed find the telephone number for the Barnstaple police. However, it seems the phone either misinterpreted the request or was defaulting to US-based locations, as it directed Saunders to the Barnstable police number in Massachusetts, USA.
Apparently about two minutes into the phone call with Barnstable (USA) police dispatcher Officer McWilliams, he and Saunders realized they weren’t calling from the same town, let alone the same continent.
Funny as this incident is, thankfully no-one’s life was at risk while Saunders and Officer McWilliams figured out what happened. There have been incidents where digital voice assistants have contacted the right authorities and helped save lives in the nick of time, like this story about a mother using Siri hands-free to call an ambulance for her toddler.
So while our technology may not always get things right, if used correctly it can certainly make an impact. That said, it seems a better bet to know your local police numbers and not rely on the whims of voice assistant technology in a dire situation.
“I think I’m going to make sure I have the police number on my phone, so I don’t make this mistake again,” said Saunders.
Larry M
“I think I’m going to make sure I have the police number on my phone, so I don’t make this mistake again,” said Saunders.
Let’s hope she doesn’t tap it accidentally.
(We live in US Area Code 919. All local calls must be prefaced with this code. The local Emergency Operations Centers have had to increase staff because of the number of calls where someone’s finger “stutters” on the second digit.)
Jim Chambers
perhaps ‘precision in language’, as the movie ‘the giver’ says, is the key here. if the caller had specified barnstaple, devon, uk police, instead of barnstaple police, she would have been directed to the correct number… worth a try anyway.
Paranoid Android
Nothing new under the sun
Many years ago before UK local government reorganisation abolished metropolitan counties, my address ended:
Stockton-on-Tees
Cleveland
A bookshop in London agreed to send me a book. Months later it arrived with scrawled on the package: “NOT Cleveland OH”
brianc6234
Don’t you have 911 in the UK?
0laf
999 for blue light emergencies
101 for police non-emergencies
MikeB-Cda
I saw this yesterday in Yahoo News, which included possibly the funniest part. Once both parties understood the nature of the error, both the woman and the dispatcher got a big laugh out his comment that estimated response time would be about six hours.
TonyG
Isn’t it really a problem. The real problem is the US-centric nature of Apple in this case. The phone has GPS and even if that is switched off, the phone knows approx. location from cell phone – the law requires location identification for emergency calls anyway.
Thus the phone at least knows what continent it is in, and surely should be able to disambiguate and figure out that someone just outside of Barnstaple UK is far more likely to be calling the police (remember it knows she is calling the police) close to where she is.
And if it can’t clearly disambiguate, it should ask “do you mean Barnstaple England or Barnstaple USA” for confirmation.
TonyG
Sorry – my post blames Siri – turns out it was Cortana. Point about disambiguation still stands (and the assumption that the US is the centre of the digital universe).