Smartphones are handy devices, but they don’t do much good in emergencies. If a hurricane knocks down a few cell towers, or forest fires tear through the already thin infrastructure of remote areas, cell-phone communication can simply disappear. Which is why, to this day, first responders like police officers and firefighters rely on LMR, or “land mobile radios” (aka walkie-talkies). Walkie-talkies have a range of a few miles and are used to coordinate everything from routine information requests to dispatch to deep-disaster response inside a crumbling building.

Now, Motorola Solutions (not to be confused with Motorola Mobility, which makes the smartphones you know), the biggest global player in these LMR walkies, is releasing what appears to be the most advanced walkie-talkie ever. Called the APX Next, it’s a chunky black brick with a thick antenna and a giant push-to-talk button on its side. Much like an iPhone, it also features a touchscreen on its front—but don’t be distracted by that. Its real innovation was born from 2,000 hours of interviews and testing with more than 50 emergency service agencies, including SWAT teams and detectives. It’s a voice-recognition system that can operate in extremely loud environments, with artificial intelligence software that can look up 95 of the most common things a police officer or firefighter would call into dispatch—like a driver’s license, or license plate—without any human operator on the other end of the line. But its ultimate promise is simply to free up the user’s hands as much as possible, ensuring that someone is as safe and capable as possible during an emergency.

“It’s a fairly obvious product,” laughs Motorola Solutions SVP of Technology Paul Steinberg, who readily notes that voice recognition and AI is all stuff we’ve heard before from companies like Amazon and Google. But as his colleague Jack Molloy, EVP of products and sales, puts it so bluntly: “If you’re standing in a high [danger] environment with an Amazon Echo, you’re not going to have the same performance as our product.”

Indeed, the APX Next is a notable device because it encapsulates modern technological trends but applies them to a highly specialized environment where they otherwise wouldn’t make sense at all. This approach to design is what Motorola dubs “high-velocity human factors.”

“It means the more a user is stressed, if a police officer has deployed her weapon, she can’t focus on anything but the stress,” explains Steinberg. “The paradox for us is . . . when people most need the technology, they have the ability to.”

APX Next is a walkie-talkie and a cellphone combined. It has both the high-powered radio chip for land communications and a low-powered 4G/LTE chip for cell-tower data. These two chips can work at the same time, which is an engineering challenge, especially because the walkie-radio has 25 times the wattage of the 4G chip. “The trick was allowing them to operate concurrently, because they are close to one another in spectrum [and that can cause interference],” says Steinberg.

The core buttons, including the large talk button, are all designed as you’d expect, to ensure they can be used without looking, and purely by muscle memory in stressful situations. Four separate microphones capture your voice, with programming designed specifically to cancel out exceptionally loud noises. But it isn’t always listening for a wake word like the Echo or Google Home. You need to hit a button to cue the assistant.