Bengaluru police have used an artificial intelligence-powered interactive voice response system to collect feedback from more than 1.5 lakh people who contacted the 112 emergency response service during a three-month pilot, while the department said its average response time had fallen to six minutes from about 15 minutes earlier.
Police commissioner Seemant Kumar Singh said the initiative was conducted as a proof of concept with Bengaluru-based startup Vocal Labs AI. The system, known as the Voice AI-112 platform, was introduced to automate post-incident feedback calls after emergency cases were closed.
The police traditionally relied on trained call operators to contact people who had used the 112 Emergency Response Support System. According to Singh, the department previously made about 25,000 feedback calls a month. The availability of operators limited the number of complainants who could be contacted, he said.
During the three-month trial, the AI system expanded the department’s outreach to more than 1.5 lakh calls. The platform uses conversational AI to conduct telephone conversations in multiple languages, allowing the police to gather responses on the quality of emergency assistance, the conduct of police personnel and the overall effectiveness of the service.
The feedback mechanism is intended to give senior officers a larger pool of citizen responses for reviewing emergency-response performance. The department said the information would help identify areas requiring improvement and support steps to strengthen public service delivery.
The pilot also separates routine feedback collection from interactions that require human handling. While the AI platform manages standard conversations, trained personnel will continue to deal with sensitive and complex cases, according to the police.
The reported reduction in response time from around 15 minutes to six minutes is a separate operational measure cited by the commissioner in connection with the initiative. The supplied report does not specify the period used for comparison, the number of emergency incidents included in the calculation or the methodology used to measure the response time.
For an emergency-response system, feedback is not only a measure of user satisfaction but also a way for the department to examine how its services operate after a call is closed. By automating a process previously constrained by staff availability, the Bengaluru police said the pilot had enabled wider citizen engagement and created a larger feedback base for internal review.
The department described the initiative as a step towards using technology to improve transparency, accountability and citizen engagement in emergency services. The supplied report does not state whether the proof of concept will be extended permanently, expanded to other police services or subjected to a separate public assessment.
