Insights with voice analytics
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 7:15 am
3. Human contact as a luxury product
Because we are increasingly digitizing interaction and communication, human contact is becoming scarce. It is becoming a luxury product, especially in contact with companies. After all, what you can digitize becomes cheaper. And everything that cannot be digitized has value. Human contact, intimacy, attention, concentration, face-to-face conversations. Again: everything that cannot be digitized and scaled has value. And because it is becoming a luxury product, it will no longer be available to everyone.
I do sometimes wonder: if human contact is increasingly digitalized and in many cases cut back, aren't we depriving ourselves and the younger generation in particular of the practice material to develop and maintain social skills? Aren't we learning to expand and appreciate our social skills in the physical world, in the conversation at taiwan telegram data the checkout, in the store and at the station?
When we look at human contact and communication through the lens of artificial intelligence, we see under the radar that companies (through our age-old drive to communicate continuously) can collect vast amounts of data about our human needs and behavior. This allows them to better understand who we are, what we do, why we do it, what we value and how we feel.
Also read: The robot and you: who will be the boss?
Especially when you consider that we are increasingly giving voice commands to the devices around us, that our voice is recorded at call centers to train machines and that companies use our recorded speech to perform artificial intelligence analyses. Then a new dimension is added to what companies know about us: analysis via speech.
They record our voice and analyse the speed of speech, volume, pauses, emphasis, possibly dialect and vocabulary. They then know how to extract hidden information about our behaviour, identity, emotions, appearance and in the future our mental health.
That may seem like a pipe dream, but it certainly isn't. Basic emotions such as joy, anger, sadness or fear can already be easily detected by the larger software suppliers in this area. What human ears cannot hear, can be heard by artificially intelligent software. And these systems can perform the analyses quite finely.
Risks
One of the risks is that this kind of voice analysis software is used for telephone interviews, and that it can then find out whether you are, for example, obese or depressed. Or imagine that you call the roadside assistance when your car breaks down and that the software then registers that you have been drinking alcohol. Will we get a box on the table during a job interview, police interrogation or performance review that measures our emotions and nervousness?
That is not my only concern. Sometimes I also worry that we are going to replace really important human contact with interaction with artificially intelligent software. Incidentally, this is the last, fifth development that I want to emphasize in this context.
Because we are increasingly digitizing interaction and communication, human contact is becoming scarce. It is becoming a luxury product, especially in contact with companies. After all, what you can digitize becomes cheaper. And everything that cannot be digitized has value. Human contact, intimacy, attention, concentration, face-to-face conversations. Again: everything that cannot be digitized and scaled has value. And because it is becoming a luxury product, it will no longer be available to everyone.
I do sometimes wonder: if human contact is increasingly digitalized and in many cases cut back, aren't we depriving ourselves and the younger generation in particular of the practice material to develop and maintain social skills? Aren't we learning to expand and appreciate our social skills in the physical world, in the conversation at taiwan telegram data the checkout, in the store and at the station?
When we look at human contact and communication through the lens of artificial intelligence, we see under the radar that companies (through our age-old drive to communicate continuously) can collect vast amounts of data about our human needs and behavior. This allows them to better understand who we are, what we do, why we do it, what we value and how we feel.
Also read: The robot and you: who will be the boss?
Especially when you consider that we are increasingly giving voice commands to the devices around us, that our voice is recorded at call centers to train machines and that companies use our recorded speech to perform artificial intelligence analyses. Then a new dimension is added to what companies know about us: analysis via speech.
They record our voice and analyse the speed of speech, volume, pauses, emphasis, possibly dialect and vocabulary. They then know how to extract hidden information about our behaviour, identity, emotions, appearance and in the future our mental health.
That may seem like a pipe dream, but it certainly isn't. Basic emotions such as joy, anger, sadness or fear can already be easily detected by the larger software suppliers in this area. What human ears cannot hear, can be heard by artificially intelligent software. And these systems can perform the analyses quite finely.
Risks
One of the risks is that this kind of voice analysis software is used for telephone interviews, and that it can then find out whether you are, for example, obese or depressed. Or imagine that you call the roadside assistance when your car breaks down and that the software then registers that you have been drinking alcohol. Will we get a box on the table during a job interview, police interrogation or performance review that measures our emotions and nervousness?
That is not my only concern. Sometimes I also worry that we are going to replace really important human contact with interaction with artificially intelligent software. Incidentally, this is the last, fifth development that I want to emphasize in this context.