There is only one thing worse, or at least as tedious, tiring and hateful as dealing with an angry or bad-mannered person face to face: doing it over the phone. Call center workers face angry people every day for the most diverse reasons, such as a technical problem on the network that, fortunately or unfortunately, does not depend on the operator who answers us by phone. Imagine the stress it can be to spend eight hours a day like this.
Solution? An AI, of course.
“Hello, how can I help you?”. SoftBank is one of the most important companies in Japan. The name may sound familiar to you and perhaps the fact that its “unknown” CEO is one of the most influential people in the world of technology and the person responsible for the success of platforms like Uber, Slack or Alibaba tells us something else. In short, it is a huge company and it is behind this peculiar AI developed by a few employees (of the around 70,000 it has in general).
Inspired by a TV show. One of those employees is Toshiyuki Nakatani, who came up with the idea after watching a television show about customer harassment. In statements reported by the Japanese newspaper Asashi Shimbun, he explains that “if the customers’ screams sounded like Medama-Oyaji, they would be less scary.” It is a reference to the anime Gegege no Kitaro. If anyone is curious, you can watch it on Crunchyroll.
How does it work? To train this AI, the team hired ten voice actors who recorded 100 phrases with different emotions. In total, 10,000 audio tracks for the training corpus. Thanks to this, the AI learned expressions, screams and what the most incriminating tones sound like. And what does AI do? It does not change the expressions or the words, as that would not make sense, but it adjusts the tone and softens the voice.
As the researchers have explained, a woman’s voice (generally higher) becomes a little deeper and a man’s voice (which is lower) becomes a little higher to sound softer. However, an operator may need to know how angry a customer is in order to react accordingly, so the system has been designed so that certain aspects of anger are preserved.
More help. Additionally, AI will help employees combat the most persistent customers. For example, when the incident has been resolved and the person persists and insists that the operator apologize or engage in abusive behavior, the AI will detect what is happening and disconnect the call after notifying the customer. According to Nakatani, the idea is that AI “becomes a mental shield that prevents operators from overloading their nerves.”
Goal 2026. This does not seem like it will remain an investigation, but rather that SoftBank intends to commercialize the technology. The target set is fiscal year 2025, which will begin in March of next year.
Image | Generated by Xataka with Copilot
In Xataka | Apple’s AI is more of the same. But it is precisely what its ecosystem needed
