Editor’s note: comments have been lightly edited for clarity
With the close of APCO 2025 in Baltimore, following June’s NENA 2025 event, 911’s major conference season has come to a conclusion (while IACP, NRTCCA, AI for 911, and other adjacent conferences remain on the horizon).
In both Long Beach and Baltimore, we had the privilege to speak with thousands of 911 professionals about the challenges they’re facing in their day-to-day operations. We asked questions, shared potential solutions, and got to know the real people behind the headset.
What’d we learn?
Here are three takeaways from APCO 2025, featuring quotes from 911 leaders across the country..
Vendors that act as partners are critical to progress
911 centers are a dynamic, fast-changing environment that demand adaptable, effective technology.
It’s clear that the vendors building the technology should be the same.
“Prepared has been extremely responsive to all of our inquiries and ideas, really trying to partner with 911 to build tools that work for 911 so we can all turn around and provide a better level of service to the community,” said Aubry Insco, 911 Communications Administrator for the City of Fort Worth, “The relationship has been incredible and I'm excited about what's to come when companies like Prepared partner with the 911 industry to grow.”
Julie Corn, Commissioner of Emergency Communications for Onondaga County in New York, echoed Aubry sentiment.
“This is a vendor who's growing, listening to their customer base and really just doing a great job in all those things that we talked about…[Prepared] proved it by listening and then turning things around very quickly and just showing us how fast you're gonna work for the customer in the future. That makes you special and makes you different.”
A customer for over three years, Executive Director Jodie Chinn of Gunnison/Hinsdale in Colorado, verified that these processes are Prepared’s standard.
“The reason that I stayed with Prepared is because of the customer service. Even 3 years in, I'm still meeting with my customer success manager at least once a month just to find out what things are going on and talk about new features.”
The future looks centralized and AI-powered
Anyone attending APCO or NENA knows how many screens occupy the modern 911 call-taker or dispatcher console. With new technology arriving at a faster rate than ever before with the advent of widespread artificial intelligence, the world of screen consolidation has begun to seem less like a future-state and more like a current possibility.
“We chose Prepared because we wanted a platform that would provide us with transcription, and a platform that would help us send outbound texts and data, as well as receive multimedia. We opted to go with Prepared because they brought it into my center and we were able to test out some of the features and we really liked the transcription piece, the insights piece that tells you about the entire call, and we also love the ability to do 2-way video and outbound,” said Jodie.
For Onondaga County, though she didn’t think she’d want a “one-stop-shop”, Julie ultimately changed her tune.
“I'm a proponent of not wanting everything in one package because I wonder if I'm gonna get the best of the best in every single product, you know? But in this case, that was true.”
She feels that the arrival of AI was almost just a matter of time…and that Prepared, in particular, arrived right on time for Onondaga.
“I've run a center for 6 years now, and I've always had this vision of AI coming to the center, and I've been hearing about it over the last couple of years, [people saying] ‘you gotta get into the space,’ especially in the non-emergency triage side.
“I thought that I'm a little bit behind the power curve, so when I knew that was one of your products, I thought, okay, that's like gotta be something that we're very interested in and [we have to] learn more about and see if that's the right thing for us.
“I'm glad we waited because I think the technology has just gotten a lot farther along. And I think you guys are just so impressive, because I've listened to different products and yours, I think, is just hands down the best one that is out there.”
Situational awareness remains at the heart of effective 911 tools
As much as 911 changes, it stays exactly the same - the goal of the agency will always be to get every caller help as quickly as possible. The better the information available to share with the field, the higher likelihood that those field responders can help the caller and the safer they are when they step on-scene.
For Jodie’s agency, their mountainous terrain presents specific challenges to their community.
“We are very remote and back country, and when we are trying to pin down locations of people, we have trouble with the tourists who don't exactly know where they always are. And so we have used Prepared to get photographs or livestream of injured parties in the back country and we're able to use that to help dial in where they're at– what kind of extrication they're gonna need, and then what kind of responders we need to send. And so it's been super helpful with that.
“We also have used the transcription piece to go back and get key critical pieces of information from extremely panicked callers that we didn't get in the initial phone call, but when we looked back at the transcription it's like, ‘Oh, they said that,’ and so we're able to relay that to our officers as a safety thing.”
Aubry concurs.
“This platform has given us more situational awareness. It's capturing everything. It's transcribing and translating every spoken word and providing intelligent insights to summarize the exchange that we've had with the community, which helps us parse information quickly to our first responders in the field.”
Crucially, emergencies aren’t always presented by English-speaking callers. When every second counts during a time-sensitive situation, the ability to cut down non-English call times is invaluable.
“One of the biggest challenges that we have in 911 is that we're not all bilingual or multilingual, but we serve communities that are extremely diverse, lots of languages spoken,” Aubry said, “In our community that we serve in the Fort Worth Metroplex, we are also a tourist destination. And so we host 5.5 million visitors a year that come from all areas of the world and speak a lot of different languages.
“When precious seconds are counting, it's imperative that we have technology that can help us break through those language barriers and create equal access for the community and be able to quickly and efficiently respond to the needs that they're communicating.
“We traditionally use a third-party language translation service that just takes some time and the strain on those call centers as well. So having the transcription/translation functionality within the communications center gave our team instantaneous situational awareness so that they could respond in a more rapid– or a more expeditious fashion.”
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If NENA and APCO 2025 demonstrate one thing, it’s that the tools available to 911 are faster, more effective, and more advanced than ever before. Agencies that are able to effectively adopt and implement these new technologies will be able to better serve their communities while ensuring the lives of their telecommunicators are made easier.
