911 Livestreaming Firm Prepared Makes a Fresh Bet With AI

Fresh off a funding round, Prepared, working to make its mark with 911 livestreaming tools, has rolled out a new product tier system — one that helps emphasize the growing role of artificial intelligence in public safety.

The newly debuted Prepared Assist cloud-based 911 platform includes four tiers of increasing capabilities.

They range from Assist Starter — previously known as Prepared Live — to Assist Unlimited, described in a company blog as being able to synthesize “all of that data to superpower your operation and reduce the burden on your team.”

In between is the second tier, which used to be called Prepared Live Enhanced and includes AI tech; and the third tier, which also incorporates audio processing and transcription.

“Over time, we’ve seen that telecommunicators need better ways to incorporate next-generation into their workflow without interruption,” a Prepared spokesperson told Government Technology via email. “With the launch of Prepared Assist and its capabilities, we believe we enable that process while eliminating clicks and consolidating tools into a single screen.”

As that spokesperson described it, Prepared in late 2023 worked “with a few different 911 centers as they’ve used the platform and its new features, in particular audio processing and all that it enables, to see how it functions in a live environment.”

Thanks in part to such feedback, the platform allows for real-time monitoring by supervisors and seeks to speed discovery of emergency locations; reduce the questions that call takers need to ask, which can reduce response times; and improve safety in the field for responders.

The new tiers represent a fresh bet that AI will play a bigger role in public safety in the coming few years, according to Keshav Vasudevan, the company’s head of product, in an email interview with Government Technology.

“We want public safety professionals and our private-sector partners to reap the benefits of the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem, while ensuring the security and integrity of the data being processed,” Vasudevan said. “As a result, we’ve architected our system to flexibly incorporate the latest and greatest of AI models to perform specific functions really well, as well as made it extensible enough to adopt new models quickly as new innovations arise.”

In late 2023, Prepared announced that it has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.