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Sensitive, new age computers

Angry yet?

Voice recognition software will one day recognise when you're really, really angry and pass you straight to a real human (Image: iStockphoto)

The next time you argue with a machine, try swearing at it.

Australian scientists are working on ways to make voice-operated booking systems, like ordering a taxi, recognise when callers are angry or stressed.

Current speech recognition technologies can sometimes detect when human intervention is needed, but need more finesse, says Professor Robert Dale, director of Macquarie University's Centre for Language Technology.

"By monitoring aspects of the acoustic signal, a machine can make a guess at the emotional state of the caller," says Dale, who predicts this will be standard within five years.

But for now, some systems rely on recognising certain key phrases to tell when customers are fed up.

"One of the taxi systems in Sydney was designed so that if you swore at it, it would pass you onto an operator," says Dale.

A network of researchers

Making taxi bookings more accurate and detecting customer frustration are just some areas of research outlined for a new scientific network the professor is convening.

The Human Communication Science Network involves academics from 17 Australian universities and will promote collaboration between a surprising range of fields.

Psychologists, musicians, creative artists and linguists will join IT, science and engineering experts in a bid to unravel communication problems between humans, as well as those between humans and machines.

Scientists hope to find ways to improve the experience for those who get stuck talking to a machine. And chances are, we'll have to do more machine talk in future, as more companies look for cheap ways to handle customer calls.

Too much personality?

Like arguing with a stubborn child, machines rarely admit they're wrong.

"One challenge is how to get a machine to realise it has made a mistake," says Dale. "One thing people tend to do is speak more slowly, but this only makes the problem worse. The machines have been trained for average speaking speeds."

Dale says one solution would be for the computer to detect when callers slow down and escalate these calls to a human operator.

There are other problems ahead as voice operated booking technologies become more sophisticated. For starters, scientists ponder if we will feel the need to interact 'socially' with these systems, which they may do in a range of ways.

"When some people use the systems they are very detached, short and snappy, like they are filling in a form by voice ... others have no idea what to do and they get very confused. They might ask 'Is this a computer I'm talking to? Hello? Hello?'"

And to make systems less daunting, designers try to inject a little personality.

"All the language that is used has to be chosen to suit the character they create," says Dale.

But there's a risk in making a computer system sound too human, especially if the systems can't live up to their 'can do' attitudes.

"If the system leads the caller to believe that it's very smart, then you might be signing up for trouble later in the conversation," says Dale.
