A company called Prepared has raised $27 million toward its tech that can “revolutionize” emergency calls.

Prepared Tech Can Revolutionize 911 Calls

Across the country, there are still several 911 centers that are landline-bound, can’t process SMS or photos, and struggle to accurately locate callers. And every second counts as, according to U.S. regulators, thousands of lives could be saved each year by reducing 911 response times by just a minute.

Prepared enables 911 dispatchers to receive and respond to texts and images, get a caller’s real-time GPS location (if supported by their phone), and even answer iPhone video calls with Apple’s Emergency SOS Live Video feature.

Co-founder and CEO Michael Chime claims that Prepared can give operators valuable context they wouldn’t otherwise have.

“The goal of our technology is to reduce the burden of each individual call so that emergency response can move faster,” Chime told TechCrunch. “If we can save even a few seconds on a given 911 call, we want to do that.”

Chime, Dylan Gleicher, and Neal Soni launched Prepared in 2019. It was originally made as a public safety app for school administrators and focused on school shootings. A year into the venture, they altered their goals when they realized that 911 call centers could also benefit from their tech.

Prepared’s dashboard for 911 dispatchers.Image Credits:Prepared
Prepared’s dashboard for 911 dispatchers; Photo: Prepared

Prepared offers a web-based platform that displays a running transcript of calls to dispatchers. The tech uses AI to identify potential items of importance, including addresses, descriptions of emergencies, and translations of texts.

“We have pioneered the use of AI in public safety to synthesize data and make it actionable,” he said. “Prepared’s summarizer allows dispatchers to read short AI-generated summaries of incidents rather than listening to minutes of call audio or reading lengthy notes. And we believe that our translation feature will prove crucial in enhancing accessibility for Spanish speakers while simultaneously improving response times for Spanish-speaking calls.”

The company recently launched a feature that allows dispatchers to chat with non-English-speaking callers using an AI-generated voice. Prepared transcribes and translates the dispatcher’s speech and reads the translation over the phone, thereby reducing the more time-consuming conferencing procedure with a third-party translator.

“With a growing non-English speaking population, especially in larger cities, this has been a high-priority request from agencies,” Chime stated, “which otherwise depend on language translators that can sometimes take several minutes to join a call after a request.”

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