How Baltimore City Uses Assistive AI to Serve Over a Million People

Featuring & special thanks to Tenea Reddick, 911 Director & Director of Fire Communications

The Baltimore City emergency communications center supports a daytime population of over 1 million people across 81 square miles. The department answers 1.4 million 911 calls annually — just under 4,000 calls per day. With 10.3% of the population speaking a language other than English at home, and call volume that rarely relents, the pressure on 911 operators is significant. To alleviate that burden, Baltimore City partnered with Prepared in early 2022.

Faster Call Processing Without the Guesswork

With Assistive Call-Taking, call-takers at Baltimore have a live transcript, AI-generated summaries, and highlighted key insights for every call — in real time, as it's happening.

Sarah Knight, a 911 operator who has been with the center for about a year, says that Prepared's transcripts and summaries "work wonders" helping her know which protocol to follow, especially when callers are difficult to understand or delivering a lot of information at once. Rather than rewinding the audio and listening again, call-takers can simply read the transcript or review the summary to catch what they missed — saving valuable seconds when every second counts.

"The goal is to get out assistance as quickly as we can and as accurately as we can. Prepared is about 98% accurate... It definitely helps us get the appropriate help to the public."

Director Reddick puts it plainly:

"If you are struggling on a call, which we all have at one point, and that person won't give you that address — Prepared has a really good map. Or they may be giving you the address, but they might be saying the street a little wrong. But when that transcription comes up, based on what you're reading and what's on the map, you've got it, as opposed to keep asking the same question over and over. And now you can send someone a little bit faster."

Eliminating Language Barriers in Real Time

Language access isn't a peripheral concern in Baltimore — it's a core operational challenge. When a call comes in from a non-English speaker, Prepared detects the language and provides a real-time translated transcription. For Spanish calls, which make up the majority of Baltimore's non-English 911 calls, operators can use a button in their call system to dial in Prepared's text-to-voice translator directly — completely eliminating the need for a third-party human interpreter and significantly reducing the time it takes to get help on the way.

The impact isn't just logistical. It's about accuracy. One PSAP leader described what happened when they ran Prepared's transcription alongside a live translator: "When we asked for the address, [the translator] never asked for the address."

"It changes everything. The call is more efficient... That entire step is gone. I don't have to depend on someone that's saying something that I'm pretty sure 9 times out of 10 wasn't saying what I was saying anyway... It is a beautiful thing, being able to bridge the gaps. I don't need to call a translator anymore. Now I am the translator."

Quality Assurance at Full Scale

Baltimore City is pursuing ACE status and has made quality assurance a center-wide priority. As one of Prepared's design partners, Baltimore was among the first centers to deploy Automated QA — and the results have been transformative.

Previously, a third-party company was QA'ing roughly 30% of calls. Now, Baltimore can QA 100% of them. That shift has changed not just the coverage, but the speed and specificity of feedback. Issues can be surfaced and addressed before they become widespread. Strong performance can be recognized in real time, not months later.

"We will know exactly where we are, exactly what's wrong. If you have a great operator who took the call, but didn't do it quite the way it should have been done, you'll be able to actually see that. It'll be flagged. We can play it, we can go right to it. It's telling you that you didn't do the things that you were supposed to do. It even tells you what you missed so we can fix that. It's 100% of the time."

Since deploying Automated QA, Baltimore has seen a 12% improvement in QA scores.

What It Adds Up To

With Assistive AI from Prepared, Baltimore City moves faster, operates with greater confidence, and maintains a higher standard of service across every call. Call-takers capture critical information faster and with greater accuracy. Language barriers no longer delay response. Supervisors can identify gaps immediately and provide coaching before issues escalate.

By combining assistive call-taking, real-time translation, and automated quality assurance, Baltimore City has strengthened performance across the entire center — and built a foundation for the level of service a city of a million people deserves.