TL;DR

Merseyside Police has launched Bobbi, an AI chatbot on its website that handles non-emergency questions and points people to the right service. The force says roughly one call in five does not need a trained operator. It is the latest local move in a national shift that is putting AI in front of routine police contact, and the claim that it can read callers’ emotional state deserves scrutiny.

How it works

Speaking to the BBC’s local radio station, Superintendent Tony Fairhurst said no other North West force has done this yet. Merseyside handles roughly 2,000 calls daily, he said, and 20% of them could be resolved without an operator, which works out at around 400 contacts daily that the force hopes to divert.

A user is first asked whether their situation is an emergency, and anyone who says yes is told to dial 999. Otherwise they can enter contact details, which Fairhurst stressed is optional, and describe the problem so the bot can collect information and route a response. He was clear that 999 is untouched and that the 101 number and its contact resolution officers remain in place; Bobbi is offered as an extra channel for people happy to go online.

On data, he said information entered is protected to the standard of the force’s other systems. He also said the assistant copes with poor spelling and grammar and can converse in languages besides English.

The distress claim

The bolder assertion concerns vulnerability. Fairhurst said the tool is “trained to understand and interpret how people are feeling”, can pick up agitation or distress, and will hand such conversations to a human digital operator or direct them to 999.

No accuracy figures were given, and emotional-state detection from typed text is a hard problem. For a police service, a false negative is not a minor error: it is a distressed person who stays with a chatbot.

Looking forward

Bobbi sits alongside the Home Office’s plan to triage 101 calls with AI before a handler answers, a scheme that likewise estimates about a fifth of calls are not police matters. The difference is that Merseyside’s version is web-based and opt-in.

As Resultsense has argued in policing’s wider AI evidence debate, forces rarely publish the error rates they will tolerate. Knowing how often Bobbi escalates, and how often it should have, would tell the public more than a launch announcement can.