Motorola Solutions announces Assist Chat, an artificial-intelligence (AI) chat application designed for law-enforcement users, leveraging the Assist AI platform that will be integrated across the company’s portfolio of offerings, including computer-aided-dispatch and record-management solutions
By Donny Jackson, Editor
Motorola Solutions has unveiled Assist Chat, an artificial-intelligence (AI) chat application designed for law-enforcement users, leveraging the Assist AI platform that will be integrated across the company’s portfolio of offerings, including computer-aided-dispatch and record-management solutions.
Motorola Solutions’ vice president of response, reporting & evidence solutions, Jeremiah Nelson said Assist Chat is similar in many ways to commercial AI offerings, but it includes functionality that is designed specifically to address the needs of public-safety users.
“You can think about it like a ChatGPT or a Claude that’s in a secure public-safety environment that has access to agencies’ data,” Nelson said during an interview with IWCE’s Urgent Communications. “It’s purpose-built for law enforcement and extends that generative AI capability for all users for public safety.
“It’s all CJIS-compliant and secure, which is not the case for the more horizontal generative-AI tools out there. So, it’s really bringing that capability into law enforcement directly.”
Executive vice president and chief technology officer at Motorola Solutions, Mahesh Saptharishi explained how Assist Chat fits into the larger Assist AI ecosystem.
“We’re making an agency’s data accessible and actionable to its staff to a whole new standard,” Saptharishi said in a prepared statement. “With Assist Chat, any role within a public safety agency—whether on the front lines or in the back office—can now converse with their data in a secure environment. As agencies advance and adopt more Assist capabilities throughout their software, Assist becomes exponentially more useful in accelerating workflows and confirming data accuracy.”
Assist Chat will be demonstrated at Motorola Solutions’ Summit event that is being conducted this week in Grapevine, Texas, according to Nelson. Summit attendees will be among the users who will be given the opportunity to work with a beta version of Assist Chat that will be trialed during the summer—a process that promises to be enlightening to Motorola Solutions developers of the AI tool, he said.
“The most interesting thing is to see how people are querying it,” Nelson said. “We know how people use it in an office environment or how we might use it in our personal environments. It’s going to be really interesting to see what kind of queries we see come in on the law-enforcement side, and then we can build out the right skills going forward from there.”
After the Assist Chat beta testing is complete, Motorola Solutions plans to make the Starter version of the AI application generally available by the end of the summer, Nelson said. This Starter version will be available for free and is expected to remain free, he said.
In contrast, the Standard version of Assist Chat will be a paid offering, as it is designed to let public-safety agencies access larger data sets—for example, CAD data and records—in its queries, according to Nelson.
“If you’re an agency that wants to load content beyond that [Starter tier threshold] and wants to connect directly to your records, CAD data and that kind of thing, that’s when you’ll step into the paid tier,” he said.
Manager of technology services at the Department of Public Safety in Lee County, Fla., JC Meyer said such AI capabilities can help public-safety agencies make better and more efficient responses to incidents.
“Assist streamlines emergency response, taking stress off our team,” Meyer said in a prepared statement. “It automates routine tasks and simplifies the steps that need to happen in quick succession to effectively respond to an emergency, giving our team more time and capacity to be there for the person in need of help.”
Motorola Solutions has not yet indicated when the Standard version of Assist Chat will be generally available.
This week’s launch of Assist Chat is the latest in a series of AI-related announcements from Motorola Solutions during the past year, including a remote speaker microphone/body camera and 911-virtual-assistant capabilities. In addition, Nelson said additional Assist functionalities are expected to be unveiled during the upcoming months.
