Speech Technology - October 2008 - (Page 18)

COVER STORY “THE INDUSTRY HAS MADE MORE PROGRESS FOCUSING ON THE LINGUISTIC FEATURES FOUND WHEN EXPRESSING DIFFERENT EMOTIONS THAN WITH EXAMINING THE ACOUSTICAL ELEMENTS.” to produce an appropriate one. “Emotional projection also requires emotion detection,” says Valentine Matula, director of multimedia research at Avaya Labs. Adding expressive speech to voice products’ output is based on the premise that these devices can accurately gauge and respond to users’ moods from their input. After all, the emotive expressions are not generated in a vacuum; they come in response to something users say or do. To accurately gauge those items, vendors need to examine a number of different elements and rely on them as queues to guide customer interactions to successful completions. Small Steps Forward Suppliers have made some progress in this area. They know that users are usually not in a good mood when they reach out to a contact center. “Customers will not call contact centers in order to thank them for a job well done; they are usually calling because they have some type of problem,” Nuance’s Faulkner notes. The company has incorporated features into its system to understand different cues, such as long pauses or a series of incorrect entries, and respond to them appropriately. Unfortunately, that usually means routing callers to live agents rather than having them continue to interact with the voice system. Vendors also need to make other determinations, such as identifying target audiences and presenting information to them appropriately. A voice system catering to middle-age customers should not have a teenager’s voice and vocabulary, and vice versa. In addition, some human interactions are quite difficult to replicate. “There are artificial intelligence elements that need to be integrated into emotive speech systems in order for them to be effective,” says Raul Fernandez, another research scientist at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. Agents are trained to apologize even if a problem is not their fault and to try to help even if they cannot, such as when a customer is asking for a refund for a coupon that recently expired. In effect, vendors are being asked to build machines that are smart enough to know that they might have to simply let customers vent for a few moments and then try to address their problems. The myriad of emotional variability factors that vendors have to take into account to add emotive features to their systems has stymied suppliers. “The research from early projects found that emotions were correctly portrayed only SPEECH VARIABILITY While companies have tried to imbue speech systems with an emotional component, a number of variables affect the way that people speak. They include: • Psychological and physiological factors brought on by gender, age, overall health, and other conditions; • Emotional states, such as joy, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and disgust; • Environmental factors, such as surroundings (people will speak loudly in a noisy environment), circumstances, or conversational partners (people speak differently to their bosses than they do to their children); • Geographic factors, including foreign and regional accents or dialects, cultural traits, and local customs; • Educational levels; • Stress levels, which affect speaking rates and styles; • Social status and economic standing; • Job titles or responsibilities; and • Drug or alcohol use. 18 | Speech Technology OCTOBER 2008 www.speechtechmag.com http://www.speechtechmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Speech Technology - October 2008

Speech Technology - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Letter Industry View Inside Outsourcing Interact Keynoter Highlights the Shrinking Technological World Former Hacker Tackles IVR and Biometrics ‘Press 1’ for Caller Thoughts Soundbytes Voice Vote A New Dragon Emerges Overheard/Underheard An Emotional Mess Emotional Intelligence The Case for Call Recording Unified in Care and Communications An Education in E-Learning Guest Column Standards Speech Solutions Voice Value Forward Thinking

Speech Technology - October 2008

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