Skip to main content

Alexa and Siri can’t understand the tone of your voice, but Oto can

Speech-recognition technology is everywhere these days, most notably in A.I. smart assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google’s Assistant. But as anyone who has ever had a conversation IRL (in real life) will know, speech isn’t just about the words that a person says, but the tone of voice in which they say them. It’s one reason that text-based conversations online can be such a nightmare, since the basic words themselves don’t allow for sufficient nuance to always convey a person’s meaning.

One exciting startup looking to inject more understanding into speech recognition is Oto, a spinoff from the prestigious SRI International, which helped spawn Siri more than a decade ago. Oto is working on voice-intonation technology that will, at least initially, enable call centers to better understand the vocal emotions of callers and sales agents alike.

Recommended Videos

“At Oto, our mission is to unlock empathy in machines, and to this end we have developed DeepTone, a unique technology based on deep neural networks trained on hundreds of thousands of real conversations to score tiny variations in the emotions present in speech,” Nicolas Perony, co-founder and chief technology officer at Oto, told Digital Trends.

These tiny variations, described as “latent speaker states,” allow the emotional tone of a speaker’s words to be registered in real time, many times per second. The system was trained on a database of 100,000 utterances from 3,000 people, taken from 2 million sales conversations.

“The applications of intonation are almost infinite,” said Teo Borschberg, co-founder and CEO. “We are entering a voice-first world. Soon you will speak with everything: Your car, watch, fridge, speakers, [and more]. Getting the nuances of speech will be key to creating meaningful conversations. Right now, we work on the human quality of conversations in contact centers. So far, it isn’t really possible to judge the experiential quality of a call based on text only; it is too ambiguous.”

Through Oto’s tech, sales agents can be prompted in real-time to put in “the right energy” during calls, while also showing sufficient customer empathy. “The value is that for the first time, call centers can measure the quality of experiences and act on this information at scale to save angry customers from churning,” Borschberg said.

Oto recently announced a seed-funding round of $5.3 million. This will be used to grow the company’s engineering and sales teams. It will also help it further expand its tech offerings to understand new emotions and behaviors through voice.

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
Apple’s new M2 MacBook Pro can’t handle the heat — should you still buy it?
A MacBook Pro set on a table.

Apple's M2 chip found in the 13-inch MacBook Pro might struggle under pressure, found Vadim Yuryev of Max Tech on YouTube. The YouTuber tested the new MacBook Pro in order to see how it deals with extremely resource-heavy tasks.

This resulted in severe throttling upon hitting high temperatures, highlighting that Apple's design choices for the laptop might not be ideal in terms of cooling. But is this really a big deal for the intended userbase of the new MacBook Pro?

Read more
Mars helicopter Ingenuity hits 23rd flight, can’t be stopped
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.

The tiny Mars helicopter Ingenuity continues to power through its flights, exceeding all expectations. Originally slated for just five flights on the red planet, the helicopter recently completed its 23rd flight and is still going. Ingenuity is on its way to meet up with its rover companion Perseverance, and in the future, it will help the rover's mission to search for evidence of ancient life on Mars by scouting out driving routes and objects of scientific interest.

"23 flights and counting!," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote of the recent achievement on Twitter. "#MarsHelicopter successfully completed its 23rd excursion. It flew for 129.1 seconds over 358 meters. Data from Ingenuity in the new region it’s headed to will help the @NASAPersevere team find potential science targets."

Read more
Lenovo’s cool new gaming phone leaked, but you can’t buy it
A leaked image of the Lenovo Legion Y90 showing its rear panel.

Created in response to Asus’ popular ROG Phone series, Lenovo Legio- branded smartphones have been well-received in China and compete against the likes of similarly themed products from Black Shark and RedMagic. The company’s next-generation gaming smartphone, the Legion Y90, has been in the news for quite some time and is now the subject of additional leaks.

The latest piece of information comes courtesy of a popular Chinese leaker who revealed key hardware specifications of the device on his Weibo account. As expected of a 2022 flagship-grade gaming phone, the Legion Y90 is loaded with powerful hardware, and has some unique design elements.
Understated looks

Read more