Remote Work & Communicating: It’s Not Just About Voice
VoiceSignals #15 — Musings on Voice tech news
Every single day there’s at least one article on every major media outlet online, helping you master the art of working from home. Plenty of advice on dealing with family and abstractions, which tools are better for teleconferencing, and what other applications to incorporate in your daily routine in order to help your children continue their education or your parent to communicate with their doctor. Teleconferencing, telehealth, e-learning have become new terms for many people that never really used any of these tools before, and the underlying enabler is Voice. Humans need to continue communicating, online, using their voice, and in an era where this may become the new norm, voice technologies are bound to become more sophisticated, offering a better user experience. But they will also need to deal with tracking peoples’ mental state, mood, emotions, and the psychological impact of a rampant disease.
Voice-enabled applications now have a new major challenge and an opportunity that goes beyond just offering a way to talk with other people. They need to be able to understand, measure, empathize and suggest solutions that will help us stay better connected, deal with stress and isolation, and even capture and measure the possibility of us falling ill. Lizzie Winter, a primary school teacher in Tuscany, Italy, who uses e-learning tools to continue communicating and teaching her students wonders, “This time has provided a strange glimpse into the possible future of learning — and it’s one that has both its ups and downs. While it is an exciting step forward in upskilling students in digital literacy, does it come at the cost of deskilling their social, emotional, and psychological selves?”. She talks about children’s wellbeing, and although most of us believe children belong -physically- in their classroom, we need to start considering how our technology can serve situations like a pandemic; or situations where someone has to be isolated for medical reasons, or because they have limited physical access. Garen Staglin, the co-founder of One Mind at Work, says daily interactions are shown to reinforce our sense of wellbeing and belonging in a community and suggests employers encourage interactions like creating a “watercooler” channel to encourage break-time chatter.
Voice technology has an opportunity to go beyond being a medium that only transfers speech. It has been pushed to the front line, and it now has to be enriched with advanced AI capabilities, like emotion detection, predictive capabilities, coaching, and many more.
Stay safe!
#COVID-19 #stayhome
What we read online…
Predicting Intent and Its Impact on Call Centers
Behavioral intent prediction in call centers can be a game-changer, providing data-driven insights based on the observations of Emotion AI. It improves matching, inform training, and reduces the risk of churn both of your best customer service agents and valuable employees.
What makes intent prediction in call centers so effective is not just the ability to better understand the eventual outcome of a call. It’s the ability to implement processes that ultimately impact intent. Let’s consider a customer support example. If the algorithm identifies a caller as someone with a high likelihood to get upset and a low understanding of technical instructions, you can match that caller with someone who has a strong aptitude for calmly relaying technical directions in a non-technical way. In turn, the caller is less likely to get upset and the intent is shifted. Read more >
#HackCorona
This Friday, March 20th, Data Natives are kicking off an online hackathon #HackCorona to find creative solutions for given problems within a short period of time. They’re encouraging data scientists, health care professionals, entrepreneurs, social workers, designers, engineers (and everyone!) to join them. Main goals are to:
1. Protect the elderly and medical workers
2. Offload the healthcare system with faster diagnosis options and medical equipment delivery and/or assembly
3. Assist with daily responsibilities for the ones who need it the most (eg childcare, grocery shopping, and medication, etc.)
There’s a Slack channel with a lot of people already on there, including us. Want to join and help in the collective? Join here >
Human Intelligence or Artificial? We Need Both
Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached a tipping point, leveraging the massive pools of data gathered by every app, website, and device in our lives to make increasingly sophisticated decisions on our behalf. AI is at work in our inboxes sorting and blocking emails. It takes and processes our increasingly complex requests through voice assistants. It supplements customer support through chatbots, and heavily automates complex processes to reduce the workload for knowledge workers. Evidently, devices can adapt on the fly to human behavior. Read here >
How Voice Tech is Changing the Financial Industry
The writer Andres Abumohor, Co-Founder and COO of OmniBnk, a neobank that provides financial services to SMEs in Latin America, examines how speech recognition and voice assistants are changing banking and consumer interaction. He talks about customer experience and how artificial intelligence is impacting the sector. Although he stops at basic customer services and doesn’t discuss call center support or sale reps, it’s worth reading and understanding the sector’s expectations and demands when it comes to voice technologies. Read more >
