911 System Translates Spanish Audio to English in Real Time

Although Monica Sanchez, dispatcher at the Presidio County Sheriff’s Office in Marfa, Texas, speaks Spanish, she often has trouble understanding the local 911 callers, whose dialect can be different from the dialect she learned growing up in New Mexico.

To translate, she often had to enlist a third party, which took precious time and oftentimes caused the caller to hang up.

The county now offers a solution in Carbyne’s AI-powered live audio language translation technology that translates the caller’s words and provides a transcript of both the caller’s and the dispatcher’s questions in real time.

“At first it will be kind of jumbled until it gets the dialect and then it will start translating for Spanish. It will say exactly what you’re asking and what the caller is saying. One of my dispatchers doesn’t speak fluent Spanish,” Sanchez said. “When they [the caller] are talking she can read [the transcription] on the monitor as it scrolls.”

Sanchez said the local dialect is “thick” and more accurately Spanish than hers, which she called slang. As an example, a recent 911 caller used a term for a stomach ailment that she didn’t understand, but the system translated it for her.

Otherwise, she would have had to make a call to a third-party line to translate the call and risk losing the caller. It also helps because she never learned numbers in Spanish and she doesn’t have to struggle to understand addresses anymore.

“It makes things a lot quicker because I can just read the transcript and talk to them at the same time,” she said, “versus going to the language line. That takes time to dial the phone number, put in the passcode, tell them I need a Spanish speaker and wait for them to start talking.”

Carbyne says it has plans to enable the system with more than 14 languages for other customers in the coming weeks and months.

“An emergency situation is not the ideal time for a distressed caller to translate from their native language to English just to convey what’s happening,” Alex Dizengof, chief technology officer for Carbyne, said in a press release. “Our ‘every person counts’ philosophy means that no one should feel disadvantaged or treated as a second-class citizen for speaking their native language, particularly during some of the most challenging moments of their lives.”