Living a Little Slower…
VoiceSignals #16 — Musings on Voice tech news
The world has turned topsy-turvy and many of us have had time to process these changes and have settled into our new ways of living and working. The Internet is proving to be an essential utility as we get our information through it, work, and speak to our extended family and friends. Technology companies are also trying to catch-up, either that means expanding their services to deal with online demand or introducing new services that can help combat COVID-19. And governments are turning to the tech industry to find fast solutions.
According to Voice Summit, voice assistants are proving to be busier every day, either that involves helping with disease prevention or detection, or simply managing people’s routines. Amazon is using its Alexa voice assistant to help users with questions like “Alexa, what do I do if I think I have coronavirus?”, while startups like Vocalis Health launched an initiative to collect “voice prints” with the goal of offering a new contact-free way for Israel’s Health Ministry to triage, screen and monitor COVID-19 patients. Even Universities and researchers are trying to detect the disease in our voice. The voice scientists and engineers at Carnegie Mellon University who work on voice forensic technologies, in collaboration with private companies, designed an experimental system to detect signatures of COVID-19 infections in our voice. They don’t see it as a diagnostic tool that can replace taking a swab and growing it on a petri dish, they do believe it could be an easy way to monitor a ton of people daily, weekly, at a very large scale, in order to better keep track and handle outbreaks.
But living slower means embracing the new reality and in the meantime finding ways to stay engaged. While indoors, how about we start listening to more podcasts, use our voice assistant to exercise, find games that can get us and our kids active, or just discover information on the Internet about things we never had time to read about. Voice technology is a powerful tool that is trying to find new uses in a changing world.
What we read online…
How AI is Changing the World of Call Centers
Call centers are already data-driven engines. The most efficient call centers are effective because they can accurately identify the most common causes of customer concerns, train agents to respond preemptively, and then evaluate the outcomes of calls to iterate and improve over time. The problem is that these processes lacked the data to be fully accurate. How the customer feels and actively responds to these tactics can have a huge impact on the eventual outcome. With AI, we can now close the loop and more fully understand where challenges exist and solve them before they impact revenue or customer satisfaction. Forrester quantifies a $1.2 trillion opportunity for insight-driven businesses over competitors who lag behind by 2021. You simply cannot afford to fall behind. Read more >
AI’s Impact on Coronavirus
Rana Gujral, CEO at Behavioral Signals, writes about how AI is on the front lines of the COVID19 response. From faster response times to spreading infection rates, to smarter quarantine recommendations and symptom identification, technology is playing a vital role in the fight against this overwhelming public health crisis. He explains how epidemiology relies on huge amounts of data to predict the spread of a disease and how the first indications of the outbreak were delivered by BlueDot’s infectious disease tracking algorithms when they identified a string of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China. Read here >
‘Zoom is Malware’
Despite the successful 535% rise in daily traffic Zoom seems to be under serious fire regarding its in-app surveillance measures, its lack of security, and of selling data to Facebook for advertising purposes. Meanwhile, researchers have been discovering security holes that give third parties access to consumer webcams on Macs. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has asked the company for clarifications while the FBI is investigating video hijacking or ‘Zoom-bombing’ as it has been coined (when hackers infiltrate a video meeting, often sharing racial slurs). The company has stopped working on new features and is pulling resources to focus on security issues.
Read here >
Can AI Improve The Way You Speak?
“Either you are a politician speaking to millions, or a professor giving a lecture to 100 or even just talking with your friends in a casual context, the way you speak matters. And modern speech analytics can help you improve it”. Theodore Giannakopoulos, Director of Machine Learning at Behavioral Signals Team, explains how AI can help improve our speaking style by monitoring non-fillers rate (uhhh, hmmm, ehhh …) and excitement. He shows us how great speakers, like Simon Sinek, achieve 100% non-filled rate, and politicians, like Nigel Farage, use excitement in populist speeches to engage their audience. Read here >
