South Yorkshire Police has become the first force to fully roll out an AI-powered call-triage system on its 101 non-emergency line, aiming to cut waiting times by weeding out misdirected, nuisance and prank calls before they reach a human handler. The government-backed technology matches a caller's stated reason for calling to a set of likely categories and redirects non-police issues, such as council or NHS matters, to the correct service before the caller joins the queue, freeing up call handlers to focus on genuine policing needs.

The force received more than 470,000 calls to 101 in the year to June 2026, with current wait times of eight to 15 seconds. Nationally, the 101 line takes around 20 million calls a year, roughly a fifth of which are meant for other organisations, alongside trivial reports such as late pizza deliveries or slow pub service. The £1.4m Natural Language Processing software, developed by the Home Office, National Police Chiefs' Council and Vodafone, was trialled in 15 forces and tested for regional accent recognition before going live in South Yorkshire on 18 August.