Axon announces Axon Assistant, which is designed to provide new voice-enabled artificial-intelligence (AI) capabilities via its Axon Body 4 body-worn cameras, beginning with real-time-translation functionality and expanding to other areas in the future
By Donny Jackson, Editor
Axon last week announced Axon Assistant, which is designed to provide new voice-enabled artificial-intelligence (AI) capabilities via its Axon Body 4 body-worn cameras, beginning with real-time-translation functionality and expanding to other areas this year and further into the future, according to a company executive.
Axon’s chief product officer and chief technology officer, Jeff Kunins said Axon well-positioned today to provide such AI capabilities to public-safety officers via its popular body-worn cameras.
“The Assistant is essentially putting an Alexa-like, two-way communications capability directly into the body camera for a growing set of skills, the first of which is real-time translation.,” Kunins said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “The beauty is that we have all of ingredients in place. This is about connecting the dots and building on top of that.
“[Axon Assistant] is taking the power of the body cameras that we already have on so many officers around the world … the work we’ve already been doing with Open AI and Draft One, and leveraging its native capabilities for things like real-time translation.”
Kunins is very familiar with voice-enabled assistant technology, having previously been vice president of Amazon’s Alexa Entertainment group before joining Axon in 2019. However, he informed Axon CEO Rick Smith at that time that Smith’s idea for an Alexa-like assistant for public safety would take time to develop.
“When I first joined Axon five-and-a-half years ago, Rick already had the prescient vision for wanting to do some kind of an assistant, but I was very clear at the time that it wasn’t time yet—the mix of the utility for officers with the readiness of the technology to do a great, high-confidence job wasn’t there yet,” Kunins said. “Now, it really is that time.”
Axon’s approach to its Assistant is different from AI announcements made by other vendors in the public-safety space, according to Kunins.
“Unlike some other things that have been announced—this doesn’t require any new hardware, doesn’t require any changes to the hardware that’s already out there, and doesn’t need any new accessories,” he said. “This uses the existing camera that thousands of agencies around the world are already wearing every day.
“It is an automatic, over-the-air simple software update to those cameras that they immediately can take advantage of, if they just choose to activate the capability.”
Kunins said the first Assistant capability will be real-time translation, which will let an officer access a cloud-based translation bot that can translate a variety of non-English language in much less time than accessing a human translator. The response to the capability has been positive among the officers that have trialed the capability during the past several months, he said.
“It’s a real, all-day, everyday thing that many patrol officers have to deal with every single day, and this is so much better than their alternative,” Kunins said. “It’s not perfect, but it is orders of magnitude better than what they otherwise have to do today, which is why they’re so excited about it.
“And when they actually try it, it works exactly as they would hope. That’s because it’s hands-free, uses the piece of equipment that they’re already wearing, and it does well from both a microphone and speaker perspective.”
Kunins said the real-time-translation capability—as well as voice-enabled-policy-chat and general Q&A offerings—will be generally available as a software upgrade in June. Other Axon Assistant capabilities, for example, license-plate lookup, weather and traffic information—will be launched later this year, he said.
Axon initially is launching Axon Assistant to work with the Axon Body 4 camera, but the AI capabilities are expected to be offered on other devices in the future, Kunins said.
“It will also become available on the Axon mobile app, on MDTs in police vehicles, and on other surfaces, but the starting point is AB4 [and subsequent Axon body cameras],” Kunins said.
Applications developed for the Axon Assistant are designed to meet two key criteria, according to Kunins.
“Criteria Number 1 is that it is high utility and high usefulness for the real officers in their real jobs—not theoretical things that might be interesting, but real-world stuff, like real-time translation, which has been an astronomically high-interest hit for customers as we start talking with them about it,” Kunins said.
“Number 2 is finding things … where the problem is robust to the current skills and limitations of the technology today in this moment. That’s why something … like real-time translation as a skill for the Assistant is so perfect—it’s extraordinarily useful and is extraordinarily robust to the current strengths and weaknesses of the core underlying technology.”
