It doesn’t get sick. It never gets tired. It won’t go on vacation. It’s artificial intelligence.
Hyper, an AI responder, will soon start its residency at the Santa Maria Police Department to answer incoming calls on the nonemergency phone line, (805) 928-3781. For a three-year service period, the city will pay around $305,000.
At the Aug. 4 City Council meeting, the item was listed on the unanimously approved consent agenda. Before the vote, Councilmember Gloria Soto pulled the resolution for discussion because she said she wanted to know exactly how the system would work and how it’d reduce the burden on dispatch staff.
“I’m assuming that the system has been vetted and that the room for error is nonexistent hopefully,” Soto said.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that it’s nonexistent,” Santa Maria Police Chief Christopher Williams responded. “Because, even with humans, there’s room for error.”
What the chief is most excited about is Hyper’s help with the nonemergency line. Last year, the Santa Maria Police Department received around 180,000 calls, and 130,000 of them were nonemergency situations, according to the staff report.
Some callers use the phone number to report incidents, and rather than a human typing out the information and giving out resources, the AI technology will do it.
“Obviously we’re limited to the number of open stations. Sometimes our staffing level is at two, like in the middle of the night. A maximum of four,” Williams said at the meeting. “That’s the number of lines that we could physically take at one time—whether it’s emergency or nonemergency—without placing people on hold.”
With the new system, everybody in the city could theoretically call the business line at same time and interact with AI in their choice of 18 different languages. Williams said he believes the tool is “a great complement and supplement to our hardworking men and women within our communication center.”
Another feature is its ability to detect if a caller is distressed. If there’s commotion or violence in the background, Williams said Hyper will transfer the call to a human dispatch officer.
The AI tool can also assist people while they’re contacting the department for administrative tasks. For example, rather than memorizing an extension or dialing a name, callers will be able to ask AI for the person they’d like to contact. Community members can also ask Hyper for a copy of a police report, hours of operation, and help getting a citation signed off.
“It would allow you to verbalize it instead of trying to push numbers and go through a constant revolving door,” Williams said.
The Sun reported in February that the same Hyper technology was adopted by the Lompoc Police Department as the latest in a string of AI upgrades to its department.
“They have cut down on their emergency dispatchers and communication center by 66 percent by actually vetting and funneling those nonemergency calls to allow for people that have true emergencies to get to a live 911 dispatcher,” Williams said of Lompoc.
All the data that Hyper collects from these calls will be stored within the city’s records, the police chief said, not with the external company, which was acquired by Motorola Solutions this year.
“It doesn’t belong to anybody else but to us as a city?” Councilmember Soto asked.
“Correct,” Williams replied.
This article appears in August 20 – August 27, 2026.
