Internal report raised concerns about AI use on Seattle 911 calls, went ignored

A Seattle Fire Department employee named Armbruster raised concerns internally about the use of AI on 911 calls, and says her concerns went unanswered. The department's new 911 call-taking platform was being built by Corti, a Danish company, and fire officials wanted to use Corti's AI to review calls for quality assurance.

Armbruster told an interviewer last month that she was told this was a pilot project covering completed calls, not live emergencies. She said she never heard back about her equity concerns.

Fire officials have pointed to Danish research from 2023 showing that Corti's AI could detect stroke in emergency calls better than human dispatchers, across age and gender. The Seattle Fire Department's medical director was a co-author of that study. Officials have not shared any research on Corti's AI covering nurse line triaging or equity, or on attributes such as ethnicity or accents, which are the kinds of issues Armbruster's concerns touched on.

Fire officials partly addressed her concerns in a 2019 data agreement with Corti.

The story matters for the Nordic AI scene because a Danish company's emergency-call technology is being used by a major US city's fire department. It also shows how the evidence behind that use is limited so far: the published results cover stroke detection by age and gender, while questions about accents and ethnicity remain unanswered in what officials have shared.