County Dispatch Center's New AI, 'Ava,' Fields 1,000 Non-Emergency Calls In First Month

WAUKESHA — The Waukesha County Communications Center has added a second voice to its non-emergency line, a chatbot named Ava that the county says fielded approximately 1,000 calls in its first month without a human dispatcher ever picking up.

Ava runs on top of Aurelian, the same vendor platform the county installed countywide on September 26 to assist with emergency call routing. Where Aurelian listens in on 911 calls and tries to extract an address, Ava is built to take the non-emergency line entirely, gather a caller's information, and either resolve the call on its own or route it to a human if it decides the matter needs one.

"She doesn't get tired of the same caller three times in a shift," said dispatch supervisor Martin Geils, 51, who has worked the center's floor for nineteen years and said Ava's patience has mostly held up, "so far, during business hours, on calls that aren't about Broadway."

Caller No. 847

Among Ava's documented calls was the 847th speeding complaint of the year from Ned England, 70, of Backslide Way, who has spent much of 2026 tracking hospital-bound traffic on his street with a radar gun from a lawn chair near his driveway apron. England said he phoned in a reading of 38 miles per hour in the 25 zone at 4:42 p.m. on a Tuesday and that Ava asked three follow-up questions before closing the call.

"I'm not saying the robot cares. I'm saying it asked for the make of the vehicle, which is more than I usually get."

— Ned England, Backslide Way resident

England, who documents the speeding and a long-running dispute over a neighbor's Honda on his YouTube channel "Nedventuresout" (420 subscribers), said Ava logged his complaint as case number 847 for the year and did not, in his estimation, sigh at any point during the call. He said he could not confirm whether previous human dispatchers had sighed, only that it had felt that way.

What Ava Screens Out

County spokesperson Renata Klos said Ava is trained to deflect calls that don't require dispatch at all, including requests for a callback number, questions about whether a given address falls inside city limits, and what Klos described as "a meaningful volume" of calls asking whether the courthouse is open on a given Saturday, which it is not, on any Saturday. Klos declined to give an exact percentage of calls Ava resolves without escalation, saying the figure "moves around depending on the week" but confirmed the estimate of 1,000 calls deflected in September.

Geils said the practical effect on the floor has been fewer calls that start with a caller explaining, at length, that they know it's not an emergency but wanted someone to know anyway. "Those used to run four, five minutes each," he said. "Ava lets them talk for ninety seconds and then tells them it's logged. Which it is."

Not The Same System That Struggled Downtown

Ava's rollout comes less than two weeks after Aurelian's emergency-side system logged three misrouted responses during its first five days, each tied to callers downtown trying to describe a location inside the city's one-way street grid. Klos said Ava and Aurelian's emergency module share a vendor and a training backbone but operate on separate call lines, and that the downtown navigation primer uploaded last week to fix the emergency-side confusion has not yet been applied to Ava because non-emergency callers "generally aren't driving while they're on hold."

Geils said he expects that to change once a caller tries to report a parked car downtown by referencing which direction traffic happens to be flowing that day, something he said is "only a matter of time" given how often it comes up on the emergency side. For now, he said, Ava's biggest advantage over its sibling system is that nobody has asked it which Broadway they mean.

England said he plans to keep calling in speeding reports regardless of who, or what, answers. "Case 848 is coming," he said. "Probably Thursday."