System Recognizes Emotions In People's Voices 127
cylonlover writes "Automated telephone services may get slightly less annoying thanks to research being carried out at Spain's Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Universidad de Granada. A team of scientists from those institutions has created a computer system that is able to recognize the emotional state of a person speaking to it, so that it can alter its behavior to make things less stressful."
Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this one of those "On this day in history..." stories? Because analyzing caller voice patterns for stress has been SOP for the big boys for years. A pretty common way to get out of the voice prompts and to a person who will likely be competent enough to help you is to swear profusely at the voice recognition system. You'll then often be passed to a senior CSR who can get shit done. The catch is that they're authorized to hang up on you more quickly than a regular rep if you continue to swear once they're on the line.
I guess the news here is that the existing technology is being used to present automated scripts tailored to the individual caller.
Don't force us to use the phone in the first place (Score:1, Interesting)
Given the widespread availability of the Internet, the telephone is really quite a useless device now, especially for business purposes.
When dealing with any business or institution, it is often much easier and much more effective to use a web app of some sort. These kind of apps work perfectly fine for most people, and they avoid a lot of the confusion and annoyance that can happen when having to use a telephone-based system. In the remote chance that the user needs to deal with a live person in realtime, there are many chat systems available that work just fine.
Spoken communication is a relic of the past. It is usually no faster than using a web app or other written communication, and most of the time is much slower and much more prone to inaccuracies creeping in. In the vast majority of cases, the phone shouldn't even be an option. If it is, it should merely be the last resort.
Don't they already have this? (Score:2, Interesting)
Every time i call Charter Communications to talk about bogus charges that have been added to my bill, it's like they know automatically how pissed off i am.
The past couple times i hardly have to say anything other than "fuck" and they immediately transfer me over.
"Press 0 if it's relating to a new plan. Press 1 if it's..."
Fuck!
"We'll transfer you over to a representative."
Re:Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
Old news (Score:4, Interesting)
Real time speech analytics for call centers has existed for seven years. The better products came out of Israel, at least the first and second generation IP Telephony capable systems. Inflection based triggers have existed in traditional TDM systems for over twelve years, so not real sure why this specific article is so intriguing. Just about any high end inbound call center will use some form of inflection and emotion algorithmic processing, more so once you get into the arm pit of finance, collections.
The systems I manage process over 500 million calls per month, across multiple industries and pbx vendors. The majority of the volume is processed using Cisco and Interactive Intelligence products, with an assortment of one off custom solutions. Of that 500 million calls per month, over 30% of the calls have used some form of inflection and emotional detection within the last eight years.
*yawn* another slow news day?
Re:even easier (Score:5, Interesting)
just have the system scan for curse words. easier than detecting emotion, and probably more accurate to determine when people are hating the IVR.
You would be shocked at the number of IVR systems that currently do this.
"Fuck" is the new "mash zero"
At least the ones I am forced to use on a regular basis most seem to support swear words as valid options. Or at least "fuck" and "shit", haven't tried any others.
On the non-regular calls I only try this trick when my intent is to trigger "Press zero to speak with a representative", seems to be roughly 50% success rate in my semi-limited experiences.
The only system I can think of that did not support it was my last bank. However their system couldn't be interrupted with menu presses, so you had to wait until it was finished speaking or it would ignore touch tones. Also hitting zero did not take you to a human, but back to the main menu to start over. :P
I'm pretty sure they purposely designed it to make you scream "fuck!" a lot and that was listed in the design requirements specified by the customer
In closing, hey Huntington if you're listening, you suck balls.
For everyone else, give it a try next you need to press zero anyway. If nothing else, it's pretty amusing.