Pt 1: Communications
2002:The popularity of "hands-free" headset phones prompts the first of many stand-up comedians to observe that it is becoming difficult to differentiate between people talking on their cell phones and "street crazies talking to the voices in their heads."
2003: Researchers develop a prototype for the first cell-phone implant, the "tooth phone." The prototype is displayed in the Science Museum in London. News of the invention is reported in tech magazines and various mainstream news sources as a "shape of things to come" curiosity, but largely ignored.
2004: Advances in voice-recognition software leads to the testing of the first commercially viable "phone-bots", interactive customer-service AIs that aim to mimic interactions with real human operators. Able to learn from interactions, the synthetic operators display facility with word recognition approaching human levels, combined with integrated expert systems that allow them to answer almost any well-formed question without detectable delay. The phone-bots are initially envisioned as a replacement for voice-activated "phone trees" which ask users to select from a menu of options.
2005: Researchers test tone-recognition routines that provide an automated basis for evaluating the psychological state of a caller; An early publicized example is used to create MIT's "Jerk-o-meter," which uses metrics of pitch variation, rate of speech and length of pauses to assess a caller's mood.
2006: Developers of customer-service AIs at VoxInterActiv incorporate this technology into test versions of M-Path, a phone-bot that automatically modulates the computer's speaking voice to adjust to the emotional agitation level of the caller. Taking their cue from studies showing that hearing a consistently calm-sounding voice can further enrage certain already-irritated customers, designers endow their computerized receptionist with the capability of altering its responses to accommodate varying levels of customer agitation, adjusting the tone of its responses to sound appropriately "polite and deferential" or "confident and reassuring" as the situation dictates. Initial testing shows that callers prefer interacting with the automated receptionist over a human in 7 out of 10 instances.
2007: InCelCo announces the release of its Executive Class line of cell phone implants. As with the first mobile phones and later cell phones, it is first marketed to high-end users by emphasizing the product's exclusivity and through appeals to new-technology fetishism. The fact that they must be surgically implanted helps to impart this cachet, as does the fact that the Executive Class users must register with the Department of Homeland Security and receive a special permit to operate the strong encryption measures that come as a standard feature.
2009: Automated customer service representatives are now far more common than their human counterparts. Able to answer most customer inquiries with far greater speed and accuracy than human operators, the phone-bots can also draw on a database of regional variants in pronunciation and syntax to adjust to the caller's speaking style. The phone-bots are designed for seamless interactivity to create the illusion of "conversation," but only within the realm of well-formed question-and-answer type interactions. They continue to perform poorly compared to humans when required to initiate conversation threads or when called upon to answer incongruous or poorly-formed questions. The "nonsense blind spot" creates a special employment niche for human agents, who deal with the small percentage of customers who are too incoherent for an AI to cope with.
Next: Pt 2:Implants and Imposters
Posted by flamingbanjo at August 12, 2005 03:51 PM