We all have (or should have) emergency numbers in mind in case something happens to us. In the European Union, the number to call emergencies is 112, and this is the number that Siri goes to when we ask for urgent help or detect a fall or traffic accident.
The latter, robocalls, is something Apple even brags about in its advertisements: without us having to do anything, an automated voice informs emergency services of the location and status of a possible victim. Now well How do the emergency services react to these calls? We have started to receive responses on this.
“Residue”, but with predictions of ceasing to be
112 emergency service operators must be ready to respond to calls from people in very delicate situations: traffic accidents, falls, incidents… there is not a second to lose: In a case where I myself had to call to help someone who had fallen off a bicycle in Barcelona, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the ambulance arrived in less than 4 minutes in the one of the busiest areas of the city.
Emergency calls from Apple Watch and iPhone will become more common, and help desks are already aware of this
But of course: in the automatic calls of the iPhone and the Apple Watch it is not a person who speaks: it is an algorithm. A spokesperson for the 112 emergency service in Catalonia told us that for now these calls “they are very residual in nature”and therefore operators treat them like any other call made by human persons.
In any case, from the Catalan service they also inform that they are attentive to what they think is a trend of increasing these robocalls, and that they are already consider working on a “specific modus operandi” to serve them more effectively.
We have also contacted the 112 emergency service in Madrid, Andalusia, Valencia and the Basque Country, but we have not received any specific information from them (if we receive any, we will update this article with their statements ). We’ve been considering this kind of emergency calls from Apple Watch for a few years, and now that the iPhone 14 is able to detect traffic accidents no wonder they are already considered special protocols for these robocalls. Before long, such calls could become much more common.
