Overview
- Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary and Thames Valley Police have begun a public trial of Bobbi as an additional online contact channel across their areas.
- The assistant cannot be used to report crimes or replace the 999 emergency line, and it sits alongside existing phone lines, online forms and front counters.
- More than 200 people, including representatives from victim care groups and independent scrutiny panels, tested the system during development.
- Bobbi follows the same guidance used by human call handlers and, according to local reporting, relies on closed-source data from the two forces with chats kept within the organisations.
- The forces describe the tool as a work in progress that will be continually trained and updated, with digital desk operators available around the clock to handle queries the assistant cannot resolve; some media coverage notes questions about effectiveness and possible impacts on jobs.