A leading Japanese technology giant, SoftBank Corp., has unveiled new phone technology that applies AI-voice processing to engage and at the same time address the increasingly pressing issue of customer harassment during call center operations. The new system, tagged "emotion-cancelling," utilizes artificial intelligence to make angry callers sound calm and composed, thereby releasing calmer voices out and reducing the stress of call center operators.

The technology has been developed by SoftBank engineers over the past three years. It identifies the tone of an angry caller and changes it by adopting a two-step process. The technology extracts key acoustic features of the comments made by the caller using AI-voice processing and assimilates the acoustic characteristics of a non-threatening voice to create natural and calm tones.

With over 10,000 items of voice data sampled, the system generalized the patterns common to the delivery of common phrases: 10 male and female actors per phrase and various emotional tones. The technology does not distort the words of the caller, though the intonation is markedly restrained, enabling a representative to understand the context without aggression in the intonations.

According to the recent survey done by the Japanese largest industrial union called UA Zensen, 46.8% of service industry workers recounted the experience of being harassed by customers over the last two years, some of them found the events to be so distressing that they had to go for counseling.

The "emotion-cancelling" technology in SoftBank is therefore very handy, as call-center staff faces growing stress in face-to-face interactions amid angry outbursts by unsatisfied customers. With the launch of this innovative solution, SoftBank will take a giant leap in ensuring the safety of its call center operators toward a harmonious customer service experience.