Japanese tech company SoftBank Corp. announced that it developed an AI voice-altering technology to protect call center employees from customer harassment.
Japanese service industry workers have seen an increase in customer harassment, with call center operators increasingly in the firing line of angry callers.
The “emotion canceling” project called SoftVoice was started three years ago by SoftBank employee Toshiyuki Nakatani after watching a TV program about customer harassment.
The system, set to launch next year, detects when a caller is angry and transforms the caller’s voice into a calmer tone while not changing their words.
The goal behind the system is to reduce the psychological burden on call center operators while they work to resolve the caller’s issue.
SoftVoice removes angry emotion from a callers voice while retaining the words. Source: SoftBank
The pitch and inflection are softened without losing the intent behind the call. The intimidating bass tone of a man’s voice is raised to a higher pitch to sound softer while a woman’s high-pitched voice is dropped to a lower tone to sound less resonant.
The developers allow just enough emotion to come through so the operator knows when they’re dealing with an irate caller and can react accordingly.
The AI was trained using 10,000 pieces of voice data from ten male and female actors hired to perform more than 100 phrases including yelling and angry accusatory tones.
AI is already replacing human call center operators, but are they up to the challenge of navigating the social intricacies of Japanese culture?
Nakatani explained that “AI is good at handling complaints and can do so for long hours, but what angry customers want is for a human to apologize to them.”
Nakatani said he hopes that his AI voice-altering system “will become a mental shield that prevents operators from overstraining their nerves.”
If you work in a call center and think this is a great idea, you may need to wait a while before trying it out as the system only works in Japanese for now.
