Japan: SoftBank’s ‘emotion canceling’ AI tones down customers’ anger
interestingengineering.com
SoftBank is using AI to combat customer harassment in call centers. Its "emotion canceling" technology softens angry customers' voices.
  • mozz
    9•8 days ago
    1. Let the customer service representative turn the thing on or off depending on what they want
    2. Don’t try to modify the customer’s speech in flight. Just recreate the speech entirely when it crosses a certain emotion threshold. “Now you better listen to me–” (Donald Duck voice kicks in). Guaranteed that dealing with angry customers would become a lot less unpleasant. You just gotta modulate, so that it’s funny enough to preserve the call center person’s mental health, but not so funny that they can’t keep from laughing.
    • BubbleMonkeyEnglish
      2•8 days ago

      Yeah, I tend to agree with this, because I’ve been to various places where they cut you down to nothing with a sweet tone and ostensibly nice words… it’s the phrasing and cultural intention, plus slight inflections for anyone not intimately familiar with the cultural aspect. Nothing this would see as aggressive, but absolutely hostile all the same.

      But beyond that, they could fix customer hostility by providing actual customer service, preferably by people who natively speak the same language as the caller (I don’t personally mind non-native speakers, but they frequently don’t understand what’s said to them, and thus don’t properly perform their duties - a feature, not a bug, I’m sure), instead of running a company built around screwing everyone for every cent possible…

  • SUPAVILLAINEnglish
    1•7 days ago

    “We are working on the development of a solution that can convert the customer’s voice into a calm conversational tone and deliver it to our workers using AI-enabled emotion recognition and voice processing technology,” SoftBank said in a press release.

    Okay so this is still just some techbro pipe dream that’ll likely never be delivered on; got it.