Chicago Sun Times Article

Fire dispatch system gets new voice

Chicago Sun-Times. April 13, 1999. p. 8

BY FRAN SPIELMAN CITY HALL REPORTER

A computer-generated voice that relays emergency dispatches to Chicago fire houses has been replaced by a voice that sounds human, eliminating the last major kink at Chicago's 911 emergency center.
The new voice is also generated by a computer, but you'd never know it, according to Glen ``Skip'' Funk, director of the city's Office of Emergency Communications. It sounds just like a woman's voice that's clear as a bell and easy to understand.

With the old voice dispatch, when word went out on the loudspeaker that there was a fire at a particular address, nobody in the firehouse was ever sure where they were expected to go.

``It was very difficult to understand,'' Funk said Monday. ``As much as we did to the old voice to try to make it clearer, it just wasn't enough. We had to put that aside and put a better voice in. ... It's a [computer] generated voice, but ... it's as clear as you talking to me.''

The new voice was created by a California company called Locution Inc. The cost was not available.

Fire equipment is dispatched from the 911 emergency center through a dual-track system that includes written instructions over an alarm terminal and an audio message over a loudspeaker piped into the firehouse. When firefighters have to stop to check an address, valuable time is lost.

The new voice system eliminates the last major kink in a $217 million 911 system plagued at the outset by major problems.

For the first two years, the Fire Department continued to dispatch emergency vehicles manually because of a shortage of personnel and persistent problems with computer software.

In 1997, an exasperated Mayor Daley hired Funk, a retired U.S. Navy commander, to correct the system's problems.

Dispatchers and call takers were hired. A room where alarms from 1,622 schools, hospitals and nursing homes are received was monitored round-the-clock, instead of being unstaffed overnight. Automatic vehicle locator devices were installed in 318 Fire Department vehicles.

And city contractors engineered a software fix to make fire call boxes compatible with the integrated mapping system that's the guts of computer-aided dispatch. Fire equipment went online in May 1997, and ambulance service followed a month later. While a system that fields 12,000 emergency calls each day and 3.8 million a year is never perfect, the major hurdles have been cleared, officials said.

Now all that remains is a $5 million fix to make the entire system Year 2000 compliant and an aggressive marketing campaign to persuade Chicagoans to call 311 for non-emergencies. The 311 roll-out--complete with billboards, commercials and public service announcements--is scheduled to begin next month.

Asked if he planned to stick around to run the system now that it's running relatively smoothly, Funk said, ``Well, I don't know. I can't answer that.''