Now AI will soften our fury at call centre staff. Let’s rage against this machine

The Japanese company SoftBank is developing an “emotion-cancelling” filter called SoftVoice for call centre workers to screen out the inevitable parade of angry people who have been waiting 2½ hours to speak with a human, just to be told that, while their call is very important, they are unable to help them with their request.

“The AI isn’t designed to remove all of the angry notes entirely, but to keep just a slight hint of the frustration so that the call centre responder is still able to get some vague sense of how to respond,” Kate Irwin wrote in PC Mag.

You’re not quite hearing me.Credit: iStock

We know that call centre workers are probably the most yelled-at people, aside from parents of toddlers or parking enforcement officers, but surely censoring human emotion is the most dystopian use of AI being dreamed up right now?

I mean, we could all use a bit of AI emotion-altering software, like removing passive-aggression in your voice when reminding your husband for the fifth time to take out the bins, toning down the sarcasm when your boss asks why your small children appear to be sick all the time, as you imagine the parade of exotic germs they bring home from daycare every day, or responding civilly to your mother, who has reminded you again (in case you forgot) that bacon actually causes cancer.

Like many women brought up to be nice and not rock the boat, I struggle to be assertive. If you step on my foot, I will apologise to you for having placed it in the wrong spot. If you’re upset about something, I will assess your ashen face and assume that I’ve done something to cause it. We apply words like “bossy” to women when men with a similar temperament are “assertive”. Women are “shrill”, unlike men, who are “emphatic”. Anger is not feminine, and I somehow absorbed this notion unconsciously.

But this changed when Scott Pape’s Barefoot Investor mania swept through Australia and we all talked about our “buckets” for dividing our money and carried around orange bank cards. In 2018, I read Pape’s “script” about negotiating debt with the banks. I had two credit cards at the time, with repayments piling up faster than I could manage, and I was also pregnant and desperate to get rid of them before we entered this new phase of our lives.

SoftBank plans to release SoftVoice. Credit: AP

Pape’s advice made me realise that it was an achievable goal, but only if I could be assertive with the myriad call centre workers I knew I would be subjected to. I needed to switch on my inner Karen and speak to the manager. It turns out that being put on hold for hours a day while having a watermelon pressing on your bladder is naturally conducive to anger, so I didn’t need much practice.

I tried to find the line between “assertiveness” and “anger” but sometimes it was difficult when chatting with people trained to sound like emotionless bots while reading heavily scripted dialogue like, “I am sorry for the inconvenience.”

I had to file complaints and leave unsatisfactory reviews of call centre staff so that my “issue” could be escalated until I could finally speak to someone at the bank who had the power to negotiate with me. I didn’t want to practise my assertiveness or express anger to call centre workers who were being paid a fraction of what we, in Australia, would consider “minimum wage”, but it was the only way to be heard.

Corporations get away with a lot because most of us are either unwilling to wait for hours, go through these convoluted rabbit-hole-menu phone calls, or when we do get through, we’re too polite to push it any further and be the squeaky wheel that gets the oil.

And now, the people who do respond in anger are seen as the problem and need an AI solution to censor them, rather than acknowledging that the entire system is stacked against the consumer, with call centre workers placed in the middle to cop it from everyone.

So no, don’t censor my anger. In the words of popular psychologist Harriet Lerner, anger may be a message that your needs aren’t being met, and in the case of our dysfunctional relationship with call centres and the corporations running them, the message is this: STOP FOBBING ME OFF. Thank you and have a nice day.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.