• Fondots@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      This absolutely can be a useful tool for deaf people or others with hearing/speech difficulties.

      However, there are already several ways for deaf people to contact 911 without text-to-911

      I work in 911 dispatch, probably the most common way I’ve gotten calls from deaf people is through a video really interpreter. The caller is basically on a video call with an interpreter and they relay what’s being said to us. There’s very little delay in communication like there can be when you’re typing back and forth, and usually it works pretty well. There are some situations where it has its issues, if the caller is somewhere dark it can be hard for the interpreter to see what they’re signing, if they don’t have a video-capable device they of course can’t use it at all, and a lot of our deaf callers come from a behavioral health group home place in our county, and some of those callers have a tendency to just kind of walk off-street in the middle of the call, though it’s still kind of useful because the interpreter can at least try to describe what they’re seeing and hearing in the background if the caller didn’t hang up.

      Also all 911 centers (in the US at least, I assume it’s probably the same elsewhere in the world) are required to take TTY/TTD calls. The classic example of these is the caller has a device that kind of looks like a typewriter with a little screen and a speaker and microphone they place a phone handset on. They type out their message,the device turns it into a bunch of beeping noises that go out over the phone line like a regular voice call, and the person on the other end’s TTY device (in our case it’s built into our computer phone system) decodes the beeps back into text. Most, if not all cell phones these days also have TTY built into them in the accessibility settings somewhere. There’s some grammar peculiarities because it doesn’t really include punctuation, and some tty users will use ASL gloss, which is a written form of ASL (ASL isn’t totally 1:1 with English, and if you don’t know what you’re looking at ASL gloss reads kind of like that bit from The Office “why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.”) It also allows for hearing or voice carryover, where the caller is able to hear but not speak or vice-versa, so you only need to use TTY for half the conversation and can communicate verbally for the other half. The 2 biggest drawback is that we hear all of these TTY beeps in our headset, and they get pretty annoying really quick, small price to pay though, and generally only one party can be typing at a time, so you have to wait for them to finish before you can reply.

      I will say that, at least in my area, TTY is vanishingly rare. In the 6 years I’ve been here, I’d be amazed if we’ve gotten 3 calls from an actual deaf person using TTY, although we did have one mental health patient who used it on his cell phone and used it to just ramble nonsense at us. He had no hearing or speech difficulties, sometimes we were able to get him to talk to us

      In either case, if you call from a landline, we get your address just like a regular phone call, with tty from a cell we also get your cellular location like a regular call. Video relay calls from cell phones can get a little funny location wise because of how the call needs to be routed, often it works out that we get a home address they have on file and not their actual current location. With texts the location data often isn’t very good (although we’re implementing some new technologies at my center that improve on it a bit, though it’s still not as reliable as a voice call in some ways)

      I posted another comment/rant in this thread with some of my gripes about how people use text to 911 if you haven’t already seen that, and I do want to reiterate that it is a really good option to have available, we can always use more tools in our toolbox, and it can definitely be useful in some circumstances, but it does tend to get misused in some frustrating ways for us.

        • Fondots@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Yeah, didn’t mean to imply that you were, just wanted to expand on options for deaf people that are already out there, and point out some of the relative strengths and weaknesses they have compared to text-to-911

    • Dempf@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      “911 please help I’m dying”

      *message disappears because you have admin rights

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
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    5 months ago

    That’s super nice for rooted and custom ROM users where RCS doesn’t work.

    • deranger@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      For the longest time I thought it was “left unread”, because I’d never open a text I intend to ignore if read receipts are on. Just read the notification and leave them unread.

    • TurboWafflz@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Honestly I feel like Google Voice isn’t going to be around long enough for that. It really doesn’t feel like something Google would make today and most of the Google products like that get discontinued eventually

  • TonyOstrich@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Unless you are running a rooted phone in which case Google says to go fuck yourself. If your phone doesn’t pass Play Integrity they will not allow RCS to work (among other things) but they don’t even indicate that to the user. It just silently doesn’t work.

    Play Integrity Fix is a mod that addresses this, but recently Google has been fighting back and breaking the way the mod works every other month. Their last salvo was middle of last week and last I checked the XDA thread a solution had not been found yet.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Using SMS to contact 911 is available at just over half of all emergency dispatch centers in the US, but in those areas, people using RCS will benefit from a handful of new features like location sharing and read receipts.

    Google is working with a company called RapidSOS, which can already relay certain medical information to emergency responders for both iPhone and Android users.

    The FCC says that in areas where texting with 911 isn’t supported, wireless carriers are required to provide a bounce-back message directing them to place a call instead.

    So nobody has been left wondering if a message went through, in theory, but a read receipt is reassuring nonetheless.

    RCS will also support higher-quality image and video sharing with first responders and will allow you to send your precise location.

    Google says it’s working with its partners to expand RCS messaging with emergency services and is “inviting the ecosystem to partner with us to provide reliable emergency messaging for everyone.” I can’t help feeling that’s a nudge in Apple’s direction, which is widely expected to announce RCS support at WWDC next week.


    The original article contains 282 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 34%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • Varven@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I think this is a horrible idea it’s just gonna take so long and what if your a slow typer

    • Plopp@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Yes sadly this means emergency services will no longer be able to take your call because they got rid of their phones. If you really want to talk you’ll have to book a Zoom appointment, so schedule your stabbings ahead of time.

      • Varven@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Ok then I’m going to have to talk the guy who’s gonna stab me and where gonna have to agree on a time see if he can fit me

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      Almost every normal human is a slow typer on a touchscreen. They don’t blame touchscreens for that, because they like them and actually typing lots of text is irrelevant for those normal humans.

      I’ve just watched “Idiocracy” yesterday. I didn’t like how similar to the humanity of the future I am myself, and the use of IQ as some real measurement felt kinda idiotic, but - the general idea feels right.

      • Plopp@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I pretty much blame touchscreens for the downfall of humanity. But I guess I’m not “normal”.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          Only the loud social people who wouldn’t survive without the help of various freaks (who solve disasters and predict crises and say “told you so”) are normal. While those freaks should be grateful for being not completely useless for their normal society. Of course their usefulness is evaluated by the normal people’s measure, which ignores disasters, crises, deep mistakes, structural faults and other such things. Because among normal social people every victory has many fathers and any defeat is an orphan (but they secretly suspect that those freaks who mitigated its harm are to blame).

          The way for comfortable existence is knowing that they, normal people, are wise and kind and don’t blame us for being the freaks we are. Though they are still a bit sore at us for all those problems in the reality they chose, like computer programs still not writing themselves and not understanding human language. But they are also magnanimous and forgiving.

    • Fondots@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I work in 911 dispatch, there is an audible groan whenever anyone here gets a text to 911

      Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that it’s a tool that’s available, there are certain cases where it can be really useful, domestic abuse situations where you’re unable to make a voice call because you’re abuser is in the room or car with you, an active shooter situation where you’re hiding and don’t want to give away your location, people with hearing or speech issues, etc.

      That’s almost never what it gets used for.

      Most of the time it’s someone calling in some non-emergency. I suspect in their minds it’s probably quicker and more convenient for us to get a text, but it really isn’t. We’re not multitasking and taking other calls at the same time we’re on the text, when we’re on the text, that is what we’re doing, same as if we were on a regular 911 call. And that first text usually is missing some crucial information about what is going on, and it takes a whole lot longer to go back and for asking questions and waiting for an answer by text than if you just made a phone call, if they even reply at all to answer my questions, very often they put their phone in their pocket and never look at it again for the rest of the night. We can’t even call them back because we don’t know if it’s safe for them to speak on the phone, we just have to sit there for 5 minutes waiting for a reply that isn’t coming before we can disconnect.

      I’ve also definitely had at least one instance where the caller was definitely texting while driving, and not for anything remotely urgent enough that they couldn’t have found somewhere safe to pull over first.

      Agency policies will vary on how texts to be handled, I can only really speak for where I work.

      Most calls, even a lot of actual actual emergencies, if my caller is cooperative and knows where they are, and the situation isn’t actively evolving while I’m on the phone, I can handle in about 2 minutes or less, sometimes I can even get it down to less than a minute. I’m going to easily spend twice that on most text conversations, and often I’m going to be tied up on it significantly longer.

      Technology also varies a bit from one place to another, but we also don’t get the same kind of location info with a text like we do on a regular phonecall (and even on a call our location data may not always be super accurate or useful) we did recently get some of our systems updated, and we get more information than we did before, but it’s still less reliable than on a phone call.

      And we also can’t transfer a text like we can with a voice call, so if you’re texting regarding something going on at your grandma’s house in another state (we get calls like that all the time, where someone tells a friend or relative about something going on, but can’t or won’t call 911 themselves) we have to either A convince you to take a voice call so we can transfer you, or B make a call to them while still texting you, and play middle man relaying questions and answers between you and the other dispatcher, so you’re tying up dispatchers in 2 jurisdictions on your call (it used to be that we weren’t able to make an outgoing call while we were on a text, so we’d have to have 2 dispatchers at our center tied up on these texts, one to message back and forth with you, and another to relay the info to the correct agency by phone. We’re a pretty well-funded county, so I’m sure there’s a lot of dispatch centers still out there where that’s still the case)

      I already occasionally get people trying to send us pictures and links with no explanation (pro-tip, we can’t see your pictures or open your links with our current tech, and even if we could opening links would probably be a no-no from a cyber security standpoint)

      If at all possible, please just make a voice call, it will be quicker. If you genuinely cannot make a voice call, at least make sure your first text contains the correct location (address, municipality, nearest cross street, apartment number or name of the business if applicable should cover your bases pretty well) and a good description of what is going on. Then please keep your phone with you and try to answer any follow up texts we send you quickly and succinctly.

      And again, don’t get me wrong, it really can be an amazing tool when it’s needed, but it’s a massive pain in the ass for us when people use it when it’s not necessary and usually makes just about every part of our job harder and slower, which means slower responses to your emergency.