The technology making voice calls more cheerful
It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear, the saying goes. We all make subconscious assumptions about people based on their voice. For call centre agents, how their voice is perceived can make the difference between a sale and a refusal. A team of European researchers has now developed technology that could help them strike the right tone automatically. Funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the ACTIVATE project demonstrated the positive impact of real-time voice-augmentation technologies on the remote communications sector.
More sales, happier customers – and agents
“By improving the quality of the conversation, voice augmentation can impact key business performance indicators such as conversion rate, sales per hour and customer satisfaction,” says Marco Liuni, co-founder of Alta Voce, the start-up launched as part of the project. “Moreover, by making customers voices easier to understand and curbing the number of angry exchanges, voice augmentation can reduce employee fatigue in a sector coping with difficult working conditions.” The technologies, developed thanks to prior ERC funding, were tested with over 2 000 agents at 15 call centre sites linked to two of the biggest international call centre companies in countries including Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, France and the Netherlands. “They can be used to augment the voice of a call centre employee as they speak to a potential customer by setting a more positive tone for the conversation. They can also help to optimise the incoming voice of the customer by making it easier to understand, for instance by cancelling background noise,” explains Jean-Julien Aucouturier, CNRS researcher and co-founder of Alta Voce. A web-based dashboard enables operators to monitor the state of each application and to remotely change their parameters. The results of the trial clearly highlight the benefits of the suite of tools. An A/B test evaluating the impact of intelligibility and ‘smile’ augmentation showed an increase of 3 % to 6 % in sales per hour.
Ethical aspects of ‘faking’ voices
The project team also looked into the ethical implications of deploying such technology. To assess and mitigate risks and potential misuse, the team conducted research aiming to understand the moral acceptability of deploying voice augmentation in contexts including the call centre industry, but also a variety of other domains such as law, politics and healthcare. The study, which involved mostly young, educated participants from Western countries, found that vocal deepfakes were generally well-accepted – even if the user lied to their interlocutors about using them. “According to our data, the only real obstacle to the massive deployment of vocal deepfakes appears to be situations where they are applied to a speaker without their knowing,” Aucouturier remarks.
New possibilities for digital voice
The technologies developed by ACTIVATE have achieved technical validation by the IT departments of the two large call centre companies involved in the testing phase. Alta Voce has signed commercial agreements with several other industry actors. The team is also looking beyond the call centre business: “The technology could be deployed in digital voice assistants such as Alexa or Siri, in the design of vocal avatars for video games and the metaverse, and in the music industry,” Liuni notes.
Keywords
ACTIVATE, voice augmentation, call centre, voice call, sales call, intelligibility, vocal deepfakes, remote communications sector
