According to a report from the Japanese news site The Asahi Shimbun, SoftBank’s project relies on an AI model to alter the tone and pitch of a customer’s voice in real-time during a phone call.

SoftBank’s developers, led by employee Toshiyuki Nakatani, trained the system using a dataset of over 10,000 voice samples, which were performed by 10 Japanese actors expressing more than 100 phrases with various emotions, including yelling and accusatory tones.

By analyzing the voice samples, SoftBank’s AI model has reportedly learned to recognize and modify the vocal characteristics associated with anger and hostility.

In a Reddit thread on Softbank’s AI plans, call center operators from other regions related many stories about the stress of dealing with customer harassment.

Harassment of call center workers is a very real problem, but given the introduction of AI as a possible solution, some people wonder whether it’s a good idea to essentially filter emotional reality on demand through voice synthesis.

By reducing the psychological burden on call center operators, SoftBank says it hopes to create a safer work environment that enables employees to provide even better services to customers.

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