Key takeaways:
- SoftBank is developing an ’emotion-canceling’ AI tool that transforms a customer’s angry rants into more soothing tones, to address rampant phone harassment of customer service agents.
- The tool is expected to launch by March 2026. SoftBank is planning to sell the service.
- Japan is considering enacting laws to protect service workers from customer abuse, an unprecedented move by the government.
Call center agents are often the target of abuse by angry customers phoning in to complain, which can be emotionally traumatic for these frontline workers.
Japanese telecom giant SoftBank is developing a new AI-powered tool called SoftVoice that can transform these angry voices into more soothing tones, according to Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun. The company is planning to sell the service once it launches by March 2026.
The paper said the ’emotion-canceling’ tool doesn’t change the customer’s words but rather converts the tone and pitch of the voice. For example, a woman’s high-pitch yell is lowered and a man’s intimidating bass tone is raised to a higher pitch. NHK, Japan’s only public media outlet, added that the voice can also be changed to a child’s voice to sound less intimidating.
The AI model learned many types of vocal expressions, including yelling and accusatory tones, to aid its voice conversion. Ten actors created more than 10,000 pieces of audio from voicing more than 100 phrases in various emotional tones, the paper reported.
Source: SoftBank
However, the AI tool doesn’t completely remove any signs of anger or frustration, so the agent will still know that the customer isn’t happy and can act accordingly.
The company said the biggest burden on agents is a customer abusing and trapping them in long conversations by repeatedly asking for apologies. The AI tool can detect if a conversation is going on too long or the customer is being too abusive. It will send out a warning message like this one: “We regret to inform you that we will terminate our service.”
SoftBank employee Toshiyuki Nakatani came up with the idea after watching a TV show about harassment by customers.
Earlier this month, Japanese labor union UA Zensen released a survey in which nearly half (46.8%) of its members said they experienced abuse by customers in the last two years, according to NHK. The union represents 1.8 million service workers, but only 33,000 participated in the survey.
In February, in an unprecedented move, the Japanese government said it is considering adopting laws to protect service workers from harassment by customers, according to the paper. Such problems are widespread in the industry, with taxi and bus drivers no longer required to wear their name tags.
