Read more: Found hereHeadlines:
According to a report from the Japanese news site The Asahi Shimbun , SoftBank's project relies on an AI model to alter the tone and pitch of a customer's voice in real-time during a phone call. SoftBank's developers, led by employee Toshiyuki Nakatani, trained the system using a dataset of over 10,000 voice samples, which were performed by 10 Japanese actors expressing more than 100 phrases with various emotions, including yelling and accusatory tones.
Voice cloning and synthesis technology has made massive strides in the past three years. We've previously covered technology from Microsoft that can clone a voice with a three-second audio sample and audio-processing technology from Adobe that cleans up audio by re-synthesizing a person's voice, so SoftBank's technology is well within the realm of plausibility.
By analyzing the voice samples, SoftBank's AI model has reportedly learned to recognize and modify the vocal characteristics associated with anger and hostility. When a customer speaks to a call center operator, the model processes the incoming audio and adjusts the pitch and inflection of the customer's voice to make it sound calmer and less threatening.
The tech has been developed through SoftBank's in-house program called "SoftBank Innoventure" in conjunction with The Institute for AI and Beyond , which is a joint AI research institute established by The University of Tokyo.
The problem isn't unique to Japan. In a Reddit thread on Softbank's AI plans, call center operators from other regions related many stories about the stress of dealing with customer harassment. "I've worked in a call center for a long time. People need to realize that screaming at call center agents will get you nowhere," wrote one person.
No comments:
Post a Comment