Winter Garden commissioners are set to decide Thursday night whether an artificial-intelligence assistant named Ava should join the city’s 911 operation. City staff says the system would pick up routine, non-emergency calls so human dispatchers can concentrate on true emergencies and cut down on wait times.
On the table is a three-year contract with Seattle-based Aurelian AI to install Ava in the call center, a deal reported to run about $55,000 per year, according to ClickOrlando. Under the proposal, the virtual agent would handle routine reports such as animal complaints or water-main breaks and immediately transfer any call that turns urgent to a live dispatcher. The vote is listed on the commission agenda for 6:30 p.m.
How Ava Would Handle Calls
Aurelian describes Ava as a voice-first virtual agent that answers non-emergency lines, verifies location, gathers caller details, and produces CAD-ready summaries for dispatchers, according to a company press release. The company says Ava supports multiple languages, eliminates hold time on non-emergency lines, and can detect when a situation is escalating so it can hand the call off to a human operator. Aurelian also promotes a companion on-screen copilot that provides real-time transcription and checklist guidance to live call-takers.
Local Pilots And Early Results
Winter Garden officials point to nearby deployments as evidence that the technology can ease pressure on understaffed centers. The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office says it launched Ava on Aug. 1 and that the virtual assistant has answered thousands of non-emergency calls while improving response times and dispatcher morale, per the sheriff’s office. Snohomish County 911 has also used Ava at scale, processing more than 220,000 non-emergency interactions, and has been piloting Aurelian’s on-screen copilot to aid live emergency calls, KIRO 7 reports.
What Locals Say
Some downtown residents say they are on board with the change, arguing it could speed up help to people facing real emergencies. “To have a 911 call come in and be able to triage that really, really quickly, I think it would be great,” Jason Meeker told ClickOrlando. City officials say shifting routine work to Ava would free dispatchers to focus on higher-priority calls and help reduce burnout.
Oversight, Privacy And Reliability Questions
Civil-liberties groups and policy experts say adopting AI for public-safety communications requires strong rules on data retention, transparency, and independent auditing to avoid opaque decision-making. The OECD’s review of AI in law-enforcement and disaster management highlights gaps in legal oversight, workforce training, and accountability that officials should address before scaling such systems. Advocates also warn that vendor-held call transcripts could become long-lived records subject to legal access, and in several deployments, callers can still request to speak with a live operator as a safeguard. Local officials point to that option as a guardrail.
The commission vote will play out tonight. Whichever way it goes, Winter Garden will join, or decline to join, a growing number of U.S. communities testing AI to relieve stretched dispatch centers. Residents who want to weigh in can attend the meeting or review posted minutes after the session.
