Cogito: Empowered by phone for call centers

Cogito: Customer service calls can sometimes be episodic. The reason; There are people who are generally incapable of recognizing subtle emotional states. Imagine now an employee who has no empathy ability to listen to the other without seeing him…

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.

Cogito's business product can predict a client's emotional state by simply analyzing his 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.

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In 2001, MIT Media Lab professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland was in India to start Media Lab Asia. "I noticed that many of the meetings we had, especially on the board, were controversial," 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 MIT researchers have developed something they call a sociometer (sensors that follow patterns in speech and body movement during 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.

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About five million Americans work in call centers. Cogito created a product called Cogito Dialog, which analyzes voice signals to identify customer sentiments. The software provides information to employees of each call center in real time during calls, allowing them to tailor their approach accordingly.

"It helps in emotional understanding when we hear people," says Pentland.

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