Smartmedical's Empath Vocal Emotion Recognition Passes the Test
Smartmedical and TMJ, following a collaborative research project that began in February 2015, this week confirmed that Smartmedical's Smart Call Center System, equipped with its proprietary vocal emotion recognition technology Empath, has improved the conversion rate for outbound telemarketing.
"We started our collaborative research in order to verify whether our vocal emotion recognition technology is efficient for call center quality management. After 18 months of research, we found that our Smart Call Center System has improved the conversion rate for outbound telemarketing. We consider this a huge success," said Takaaki Shimoji, a Smartmedical board director, in a statement. "Utilizing the data and results we've acquired, we will develop new call center services with emotion recognition technology"
The Smart Call Center System can visualize and analyze both customers' and agents' emotions in real time by analyzing multiple physical properties of the voice, regardless of the language. It has been developed and refined through collaborative research with schools like Japan's University of Tokyo< and Nara Institute of Science and Technology.
"There are many possibilities in smart call centers. For instance, the system can detect [agents'] motivation. In our collaborative research, we find that satisfactory performers' motivation scores evaluated by the system are higher than that of low performers. This motivation score is a new indicator of [agents'] performance, which can be utilized to evaluate and improve our service quality," said Satoshi Kinoshita, manager of TMJ's Business Innovation Division, in a statement.
In addition to mental health care services, multiple service sectors, such as robotics, call centers, and virtual reality, also use Empath technology.