The demands on modern rescue organizations are constantly growing, while personnel resources often reach their limits. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) increases safety, reliability, and speed in operations. The automation of administrative routine tasks allows experts in the control center to concentrate on safety-critical, complex situations and final decision-making with less stress and more focus.

Technological Basis and Application Areas

Within the scope of the project, the existing ONDEWO Call Center AI Platform (CCAI) was configured and seamlessly connected to the relevant telephone and IT systems of Johanniter Austria. Three essential application areas were realized, covering the entire process from incoming to outgoing calls:

• AI Mediation (Classification & Prioritization): To minimize waiting loops, the AI recognizes concerns immediately upon first contact. Emergencies are instantly identified and prioritized for forwarding to the responsible departments, which decisively shortens the reaction time.
• AI Patient Transport: Routine tasks such as booking or canceling patient transports tie up enormous time capacities. Through the use of #ONDEWO Agentic AI, these processes are now handled securely and fully automated – including direct data transfer to the deployment control system.
• AI Alert Chain: Every second counts during major events. Instead of tedious, manual phone chains, the AI informs hundreds of emergency personnel simultaneously in natural language and simultaneously records their operational readiness, which massively accelerates the entire rescue chain.

Technology in Service of People (Human-in-the-Loop)

A core aspect of the industrial research was the naturalness and stability of communication. ONDEWO’s language processing was optimized to remain stable even under extreme stress and with loud background noise. The “Human-in-the-Loop” principle was always paramount: The technology does not replace people but strengthens existing resources and acts as a reliable partner so that people and technology work hand in hand for the benefit of the population.

A Signal for the Future of Emergency Services Organizations

The successful evaluation shows that an AI-based control center possesses enormous scaling potential. The system was designed so that it can also provide valuable services for other organizations such as the Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund or the Red Cross, as well as for other emergency services organizations (fire department, police).

Due to the excellent, collaborative partnership with Johanniter Austria and the valuable feedback from operational practice, we are pleased with the particularly successful completion of this complex undertaking. Special thanks go to the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), which made this project possible within the framework of the security research funding program KIRAS.

The “AI Control Center” project is financed within the framework of the security research funding program KIRAS/K-PASS by the Federal Ministry of Finance.

Together, we secure the operational capability of the rescue forces and the protection of the population – for a modern control center structure that is scalable, secure, and consistently future-oriented.

For detailed results, please visit the official FFG project database here.

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This project researches and develops new AI algorithms and methods in the areas of Speech-2-Text (speech recognition), context-sensitive dialogue (Natural Language Processing & Understanding) and Text-2-Speech (human voice synthesis) to automate the communication between air traffic controllers and pilots, as well as a decision automation system for ATM process automation. For the evaluation of AI in security-sensitive environments, a simulation environment for ATM processes will be developed and an external advisory board will be put together with air traffic controllers, pilots, airports, airlines and others.

The industrial research results from the cooperation between the speech AI specialist ONDEWO and the ATM market niche leader Frequentis opened up new possibilities for AI automation in the ATM area in order to achieve the next level of safety in air traffic, which we as humans cannot achieve with our cognitive performance alone. As a basis for this research, the ONDEWO Call Center AI Platform (CCAI) was used to conduct and develop the advanced artificial intelligence algorithms.

The project included technical and operational evaluation, with more than 100 test runs and the collection of feedback from 12 Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs). It was supported by an advisory board consisting of Austro Control, Skyguide and Austrian Airlines to add an operational viewpoint. Speech-2-Text transcription processing was very fast with an average time of 1.6 sec to process an average of 5-8 seconds of input audio. The radio transcription has been optimised down to a WER 13-14% and CER 8-10% compared to WER of 16% or more of cloud engines.

Based on the good cooperation with Frequentis, the interesting feedback from the participants from the Advisory Board and the current findings, we are pleased about the particularly successful completion of this complex research project. The findings of this research project result in further possible use cases in the ATM area for research and commercial ideas.

For more detailed results, please visit our project partners Frequentis official press release here.

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Only a few selected companies have such a resilient server as the  Nvidia DGX A100. It was precisely created for the development of artificial intelligence (AI). Compared to other servers, it can analyze processes, train AI and learn new information from them with higher speed and accuracy. Its eight connected graphics cards make it unusually powerful in this area.The connection between the separate GPUs allows a transfer of 600GB/sec; it has a compact size of 10.4 in x 19.0 in x 35.3 in. There are no comparable servers on the market, which shortens the time between the conception and the completion of an AI so drastically through its computing power.

On Friday, 04.09.2020, our DGX A100 was finally installed in the data center of Cloudflight. At 11 am, the server was already unpacked and installed in its cabinet in the data center. The first firmware updates have already been done by Altair’s technicians, provided by Nvidia. At the same time, Cloudflight’s site reliability engineers provided us with secure access to the DGX A100 through the firewall. Once a secure connection was established, and the first updates were ready, the control center was set up. This allows us to control processes and restart the server in the event of a failure. After just under five hours, the server was fully installed and ready for use. It was always admired because it is compact and yet delivers high performance.

ONDEWO’s goal is to use the server to improve technology in the field of voice communication with AI. Our team plans to use it soon to recognize and reproduce more languages and dialects. The server plays an important role in maintaining ONDEWO’s rapid growth, which has been honored with many awards in recent years.

Cloudflight also develops custom AI applications in various fields such as Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing and Industry 4.0, and they are looking forward to having some of their calculations purchased via the DGX A100.

Cloudflight and ONDEWO are already in a long-standing partnership, which will be extended by the server. The high performance of the DGX A100 allows both ONDEWO and partly Cloudflight to use it without overloading it.

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When every second count

Together with our partner Frequentis, we developed within a few weeks an AI prototype for emergency call centers to save lives!

Our specially trained AI understands the language of the caller in milliseconds (Speech-to-Text) and recognizes the basic conditions of emergencies (Natural Language Understanding), which is then processed and passed on to the emergency call software.

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On January 29, 2020, the IT-Business Award ceremony took place. The most economical, customer-friendly, and innovative Austrian IT projects were honored with the eAward 2020.

ONDEWO NLU AI Platform was one of the 15 winning projects and won out over 44 nominations in seven categories such as education and training, Industry 4.0, or e-government.

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