If you make a nonemergency phone call to Montgomery County’s 911 line next year, the voice on the other end might not be a real person.

Staff at the county’s 911 call center plan to use artificial intelligence to answer nonemergency phone calls by the end of 2026, its director told the County Council’s Public Safety Committee on Monday.

Like call services centers around the country, Montgomery County’s has been plagued by staff vacancies for years. The idea is that AI, which gets more accurate over time, could offload some nonemergency calls and allow staffers to focus on emergencies.

AI, more staff and more efficient scheduling will hopefully “move us closer to the goal of being able to answer 911 calls with zero wait time,” said Jennifer Reidy-Hall, director of the county’s Emergency Communications Center.

The call center received an average of 3,400 total calls a day for the past 30 days, according to Shiera Goff, spokesperson for the county’s police department. About 40% to 50% of the center’s total call volume, Reidy said, consists of nonemergency calls.

About 200 calls a day are from people who didn’t mean to call the emergency line, Goff said. (Those accidental callers should stay on the line, Reidy-Hall wrote to The Banner in an email after the meeting, because the county is required to call back people who hang-up to make sure they don’t have an emergency, taking time that could be spent on actual emergency calls.)

Susan Farag, a budget and policy analyst with the council, said at the meeting that the center has been “deeply stressed by understaffing” but also that the situation has been improving. There are now 25 trainees at the call center, and Reidy-Hall said they expect 19 vacancies to be filled by January 2026.

Wait times

At the call center, 75% to 85% of calls are answered in the first 15 seconds, and 13% to 23% are answered after 20 seconds or more, said Farag. Most of the calls in the latter category come in between 4 and 5 p.m., she continued, when there might be as much as a 35-second delay in response times.

Reidy-Hall said fielding 911 calls is a very challenging job. Employees might talk someone through CPR on one call, address a burglary on the next, and then answer a question about whether a park is open — with only minutes between each.

“Sometimes we forget about the downtime that’s necessary for all of our specialists after they’ve handled a certain type of call,” Reidy-Hall said.

She wrote that during rush hour and mid-day through early evening, people calling 911 might experience a short wait time.

“Please be patient and remain on the line until a specialist picks up,” Reidy-Hall said. “We will get to you as quickly as possible.”

She added that:

• 911 should be used only for ongoing emergencies or incidents that just occurred;
• 311 is for county government inquiries;
• 988 is for mental health concerns that do not need a response from police or the zfire department.