Voicebot 112 — Portugal's Cancelled AI Emergency-Call Pilot and What Its Failure Revealed

Portugal's 112 emergency line handles roughly nine million calls a year. In 2021, peak-demand wait times reached five to six minutes, 16% of calls were abandoned before being answered, and Portugal ranked second in Europe for false emergency calls.

In 2023 the government committed EUR 11.5 million (2023-2027) for INEM, the National Institute of Medical Emergency, to deploy an OpenAI ChatGPT-based 'Voicebot 112' that would detect language, screen out false calls, and route genuine emergencies to police, fire or medical services, with human operators always handling the substantive part of any call.

By November 2024 the project was presented publicly as advancing toward a 2025 rollout. In early February 2025, however, contractor Sword Health withdrew, with its founder stating that INEM's system was 'obsolete, fragile' and that routing calls between a human operator and an AI system was not achievable on the existing infrastructure.

INEM's worker commission publicly disputed this characterisation as 'absolutely false' and insisted that only trained health professionals answer emergency calls. As of the cancellation, no AI is used to answer or triage calls to Portugal's 112; all calls are handled by human operators.

The case is a reminder that well-funded public-sector AI pilots can stall on outdated backend infrastructure rather than on model quality, and that public disagreement over what actually failed can itself become a transparency problem.