Petr Schwarz will speak today at the ČERNÁ AI FESTIVAL about the integration of AI into the emergency call handling system

The 15 September will see the CERNA.AI FESTIVAL 2026 take place at the Gong multifunctional hall in Ostrava (Dolní Vítkovice). This all-day event, organised by Černá kostka via the ČERNÁ.AI platform, aims to bring together experts, companies, researchers and others interested in artificial intelligence. The programme, taking place across seven themed stages and featuring dozens of talks and workshops, focuses on technological developments as well as the practical applications and deployment of AI. And it’s clearly proving popular – the festival has been sold out for some time now.

One of the speakers is ‘our very own’ Dr Petr Schwarz, an expert in speech technology. Together with Václav Svaton, a senior researcher at IT4Innovations, he will share his experiences of developing and deploying an AI voicebot for the 112 emergency line. Petr Schwarz is also representing the major Czech AI Factory project at the event, in which FIT plays an important role.

The deployment of an AI voicebot to handle emergency calls is intended to address several operational challenges faced by helplines such as 112. Repeated calls overload emergency call centres (particularly in the event of widespread natural disasters); a single incident often involves several concurrent calls, and language barriers may also arise between the operator and the caller. Researchers working on the project developed optimised speech technologies and an autonomous AI agent for handling emergency communications; they integrated the agent into a ready-made platform for the 112 service and carried out relevant testing across multiple user scenarios. However, they subsequently faced a major challenge posed by new legislation, the so-called AI Act. This legislation classifies autonomous voicebots as high-risk systems. Petr Schwarz summarises the current status of the project: “The AI voicebot has been fully integrated into the Fire and Rescue Service’s emergency call-handling system, including geolocation, the geo-helper, and the transmission of extracted data back to the system for dispatching rescue units. We are currently working out how to put as much of the system into practice as quickly as possible. This is because the AI Act has come into force, introducing legislative restrictions. So we are moving from a highly autonomous system to a more collaborative approach (human-AI cooperation) in order to simplify the legislative process. Of course, we would all like to see such technologies rolled out as quickly as possible, but this is also linked, for example, to the rapid developments in the field of large language models and hardware. For security reasons, we need to run them locally. The operating costs of such a model have fallen several times over the last year alone, so it is difficult to decide when and how much to invest.”

You can find out more from Petr Schwarz today after 5 pm in Ostrava itself.

Thank you for representing the faculty and the Czech AI Factory project.