Office notebook. Artificial intelligence (AI), which puts a permanent smile on the face of salespeople, civil servants and other employees in contact with customers, is already here. For three years, several start-ups (Sanas, Krisp, Alta Voce) have been developing and marketing software that makes it possible to modify the prosody of interlocutors, based on a recognized principle: the smile of the speaker can be heard in his voice. . The stressed, even comminatory tone of the operator who has just had a very bad time with the previous customer is replaced by a few clear sentences that exude empathy thanks to “smile assistance”. Enough to arouse the interest of the call center industry which provided the first customers to the publishers of this software.
AI is indeed transforming the voice of employees with various applications. That of the start-up Sanas, developed in 2021 for the call center industry, erases the local accent of operators to which some consumers reacted aggressively. It is “break down language barriers” and of “make communications more inclusive”assures the operations director, Sharath Keshava Narayana.
The Alta Call solution, developed by researchers and sound engineers from the Institute for Acoustic/Music Research and Coordination (Ircam), improves the intelligibility of a message and simulates a smile in real time. “In contact centers, you are asked to smile all day. The engineers having noted that the prosody of the voice can have an emotional impact, the idea was to help employees defuse the aggressiveness of certain users with an artificial smile.explains Sarah Boujendar, lecturer in human resources and organizational behavior at Toulouse-Capitole University, author ofa thesis on the consequences of verbal aggression on employee performance.
Ethical acceptability
Last example, Krisp, like the two previous software programs, removes background noise: that of the street or of children playing in the teleworker’s room, up to mouse clicks. The hope of better productivity in hybrid meetings, or greater effectiveness of communication in telemedicine or with the SAMU.
The economic interest could be significant. If during an initial assessment a year ago, Sanas only reported an improvement in customer satisfaction of 21%, the start-up Alta Voce measured an increase in sales of 8% to 30% at the end of a month-long trial of its Alta Call software in a call center with 1,300 employees.
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