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.
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.
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 peaked Pentland's interest in quantifying how people communicate, which often contradicts what they say. That is, Pentland wanted to understand the subtle parameters in speech, tone, as well as language of body, 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.
All others just came out:
About five millions Americans work in call centers. Cogito has created a product called Cogito Dialog, which analyzes voice signals to determine customer sentiment. 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.
