Cogito: Customer service calls can sometimes be episodic. The reason; There are people who are generally not good at recognition of subtle emotional conditions. Now imagine an employee who has no empathic ability to listen to the other person without seeing them…
Such employees can transmit a lot of unwanted emotions by phone, destroying communication and causing discomfort to the client.
Here comes MIT, with a new AI technology called Cogito. The technology uses voice analyzes to help customer service staff understand how customers feel.
The business product of Cogito, can predict a customer's emotional state simply by analyzing their voice, although it can be used to identify post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression in veterans.
The analytical data that feeds Cogito were collected over time from various situations.
In 2001, MIT Media Lab professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland was at India to launch Media Lab Asia. "I noticed that a lot of the meetings we had, particularly on the board, were confrontational," Pentland told MIT News.
The problem, according to Pentland, was the way people were communicating. Not necessarily the words they used, but the tone and emphasis of their voice.
This experience culminated in Pentland's quest to quantitate the way the world is communicating, which often contradicts what it says. That is, Pentland wanted to understand the subtle parameters in speech, tone, and body language, which have nothing to do with words.
So the MIT researchers developed something they call a sociometer (sensors that track patterns in speech and body movement during duration of a conversation).
Researchers were able to predict the outcome of interactions in work interviews to an extremely high degree without being able to hear words from the interlocutors.
Later, Pentland's research turned to healthcare, as voice analysis could help detect depression symptoms. So 2007 was founded company Cogito, and managed to get funding to see if technology can be used in veterans who are potentially suffering from PTSD.
All others just came out:
About five million Americans work in call centers. Cogito has created a product called Cogito Dialog that analyzes voice signalto determine customer sentiments. The software provides real-time information to each call center's agents during calls, allowing them to adjust their approach accordingly.
"It helps in emotional understanding when we hear people," says Pentland.
