Prepared Ups 911 Tech Slate With Two-Way Spanish Translation

As emergency dispatch gets more multicultural and multilingual, a new capability from Prepared could make it more efficient, too.

The company, known for its focus on 911 livestreaming technology, is debuting two-way audio translation, which it said is a potentially “lifesaving speech-to-speech feature for non-English 911 calls.”

This means dispatch centers can use Prepared’s technology to automatically translate calls made in Spanish into English. The professionals answering those calls can then type responses in English — and the information will be automatically translated into Spanish and communicated, via what a news release Thursday described as an “AI-generated voice feature.”

An estimated 42 million people in the U.S. speak Spanish, or about 13 percent of the country’s population. Spanish is the most common non-English language spoken in the U.S., far ahead of Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and Arabic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Nearly one-fifth of U.S. residents speak a language besides English at home, up from about one-tenth in 1980, the agency said — one of the main reasons why translation services’ presence is growing in public safety, and in the wider public-sector world of government technology.

Prepared said it plans to add languages other than Spanish to its new translation service, but offered no timetable. The company touted its new service as not only responding to increased diversity in the U.S., but also to the ongoing challenges of hiring and retaining dedicated emergency call takers.

“Given the ongoing staffing crisis at U.S. 911 centers, every second counts and dispatchers must do more with less to save lives,” Michael Chime, CEO and co-founder of Prepared, said in a statement. “That stark reality constantly challenges us to focus on innovations that help create the space and bandwidth for call takers and dispatchers to move swiftly and efficiently.”

The company already offers a text translation service that relies on SMS messages, and which includes more than 140 languages. Another Prepared tool translates 911 audio transcripts into more than 30 languages, among its functions.

But this newest service, according to the release, “results in better situational clarity and faster call processing. With transcription and translation for incoming audio, call takers … get full visibility into what’s being said.”

That matters because Prepared said roughly half of 911 callers who don’t speak English hang up before they complete calls because of the confusion involved.

Prepared said it has raised more than $30 million in venture funding since the company’s founding in 2019. Investors include heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz and Google, via its AI investment arm.