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MIT Guy Developing Jerk-O-Meter Voice Recogniton Program
Submitted by BruceCyr on Tue, 08/23/2005 - 20:16.
TV station had man-in-the-street story about user frustrations of dealing with those ding-bat automated voice response systems everyone is using to replace human responders. It was apparently inspired by this AP feed:
http://www.wusatv9.com/news/news_article.aspx?stor...
The feed tells about an MIT master's candidate who is developing a program that "uses mathematical algorithms to measure levels of stress and empathy in a person's voice. It also keeps track of how often someone is speaking." The aim is give a sales associate or help responder feedback about how whacked out the speaker is and offer advice.
The TV story told the opposite point of view, i.e., how maddening it is to deal with an automated system, in the course of which it used a full three seconds for a clip by the CEO of Nuance (formerly ScanSoft), although I didn't catch what he said because I was grilling on the porch amid a swarm of early feeding mosquitoes.
The TV story was a tease because they kept promising to tell you how to get to a real person, but didn't deliver on the promise: I guess I was expecting them to reveal some universal secret code, like "Dial 666 with your elbow, briefly flick the hang-up switch, then make a 4-second raspberry sound with your bottom lip vibrating against the speaker element". No such luck!
Bruce
