PSAP Real-Time Call Summary Service

Overview#

A supervisor managing a busy evening shift cannot monitor every call through audio alone. With eight dispatchers active and multiple concurrent incidents, what they need is a quick, readable snapshot of each call's status without switching audio feeds or interrupting their team. The Real-Time Call Summary Service was built for exactly that role.

The service generates and maintains running AI-powered summaries of active PSAP voice calls, giving dispatchers and supervisors a continuously updated written overview of each call's content. Summaries refresh every 15 seconds during active calls and produce a comprehensive final record when calls conclude. Summary broadcasting is gated by the triage system, so only calls that warrant dispatcher attention generate notifications, keeping the dispatch queue focused.

Key Features#

Periodic Running Summaries: The service evaluates the call transcript every 15 seconds and generates an updated summary when at least 100 new characters of transcript have accumulated since the last summary. This cadence provides frequent updates during active calls without generating unnecessary summaries during pauses.
Lightweight AI Summarisation: Summaries are generated using lightweight AI models (compact AI language model) to keep latency and cost low while maintaining quality. The summarisation prompt is tuned for emergency call context, focusing on the nature of the emergency, caller location, injuries or threats, and actions taken.
Triage-Gated Broadcasting: Running summaries are broadcast to dispatchers via WebSocket (CALL_SUMMARY_UPDATE event) only after the triage gate has approved dispatcher involvement. Calls still pending triage, identified as non-emergencies, or flagged as pranks do not generate dispatcher broadcasts, reducing noise in the dispatch queue.
Final Call Summary: When a call concludes, the service generates a comprehensive final summary covering the full call content. The final summary is persisted to both the call record (the call record) and the associated incident record (the incident record), providing a permanent written record accessible without audio playback.
Organisation-Scoped Persistence: All summary writes are scoped by tenant and organisation, ensuring summaries are only visible within the owning organisation and preventing cross-tenant data exposure in multi-tenant deployments.
Transfer Context Inclusion: When a call is transferred between agencies, the running summary is included in the transfer context alongside transcript excerpts, gathered information, and medical protocol state. This provides the receiving agency with immediate situational awareness.

Use Cases#

Dispatcher Queue Management: Dispatchers monitoring multiple active calls read running summaries to prioritise which calls need immediate attention, without switching between audio feeds.
Supervisor Oversight: Supervisors review running summaries across all active calls on the dispatch floor to maintain situational awareness and identify calls that may need escalation or additional resources.
After-Action Documentation: Final call summaries provide a written record of each emergency call that can be reviewed, searched, and included in incident reports without requiring audio playback.
Inter-Agency Handoff: When calls are transferred to another agency, the running summary provides the receiving dispatcher with immediate context, reducing the time needed to understand the situation.

Integration#

The Call Summary Service connects to the voice AI transcription pipeline for transcript input, the triage gate for broadcast authorisation, the WebSocket event system for dispatcher delivery, and the incident management system for final summary persistence. Summaries are included in the incident continuity transfer context when calls move between agencies.

Open Standards#

RFC 6455 (WebSocket Protocol): Running and final summaries are pushed to dispatcher consoles over persistent WebSocket connections using the CALL_SUMMARY_UPDATE event envelope.
ITU-T G.711: The transcription pipeline that feeds the summary service ingests telephony audio encoded as G.711 mu-law at 8 kHz, the codec carried by PSTN and SIP telephony trunks.
NENA i3 (NENA-STA-010): Final call summaries are persisted into the incident record within the NENA i3 incident data model, and the summary field is included in inter-agency call-transfer context packets that travel over the i3 ESInet.
ISO 8601 / RFC 3339: All summary broadcast payloads carry a timestamp serialised as an RFC 3339 UTC string, ensuring unambiguous time correlation across distributed PSAP nodes.
ISO 639-1: The transcription pipeline that supplies text to the summary service tags each transcript session with an ISO 639-1 language code, enabling correct language selection across 130-plus supported languages.
RFC 6750 (OAuth 2.0 Bearer Token): Calls to external AI inference APIs are authenticated with Bearer tokens transmitted over HTTPS, following the RFC 6750 bearer-token scheme.

Last Reviewed: 2026-04-02 Last Updated: 2026-04-14