Who builds Sarge A.I.

A small studio, a veteran who does this work for a living, and one American Legion post that agreed to go first.

The short version

Sarge A.I. answers the phone for veteran service organizations. It was built by All Engines Studio, a small software studio in Illinois, and it exists because posts get calls they cannot always get to — and because some of those calls matter a great deal to the person making them.

How it started

American Legion Post 171 in Crystal Lake has no building. Its members meet on Friday mornings at a cafe on Beardsley Street — coffee, conversation and camaraderie, which they call C3. Anyone can walk in, member or not.

A post like that still has a phone number, and that number still rings. It rings at night and on holidays and in the middle of a workday, and whoever is carrying it answers when they can. That is not a criticism of anybody. It is arithmetic: a handful of volunteers doing the work of an office.

Post 171 agreed to be first. Their board went through the whole thing and did not go easy — one of the people asking questions had run 9-1-1 communications for both Chicago and New York City. They approved it unanimously, and their line has been answered by Sarge since late August.

The people

The crisis side of Sarge was not written by software people guessing. It follows the VA’s S.A.V.E. training and Mental Health First Aid principles, and the actual words she says were reviewed and approved by a peer support specialist with the Staff Sergeant Fox Suicide Prevention Program. Call the demonstration line and ask her what her crisis handling is built on. She will tell you herself.

What we have committed to

The majority of what an organization pays goes back out: to veteran homelessness prevention and intervention, to developing the resources veterans actually need, to recreational programs most veterans cannot otherwise reach on cost or availability — and to keeping organizational programs funded, from Boys State to community programs to recreational therapy.

That commitment came before the first line of code, and it is not a marketing line.

What we will not do

• Sarge says she is an AI at the start of every call. She never pretends to be a person.
• She does not guess. If a post has not told her something, she says so and takes a message.
• A post keeps its own phone number. Nothing about it becomes ours.
• She does not replace anybody. Every post still has the people it had.

Getting in touch

Write to support@allenginesstudio.com. If your post, unit, squadron or detachment wants to see what this looks like with your own information in it, that is the conversation to have — and it is a short one.