This. It’s amazing most people have no clue that they are mapping their mood state onto their own interpretation of someone’s text messages. We evolved to read non-verbal communication. Key and Peele have a great skit on this: [this video]
I used this to check the text messages from Key and Peele's "Text Message Confusion" skit[1]: Keegan: "I've been trying to reach out to you all day, are we on for tonight?" Polite (71 / 100) Jordan: "Sorry dude, missed your texts. I assumed we'd meet at the bar. Whatever, I don't care." Polite (71 / 100) Keegan: "Do you even want to hang out?" Impolite (30 / 100) Jordan: "Like I said, whatever." Neutral (47 / 100) Keegan: "Jesus, you are fucking priceless" Impolite (30 / 100) Jordan: "You're the one who's fucking priceless!" Impolite (6 / 100) Keegan: "You wanna go right now?" Impolite (31 / 100) Jordan: "Ok let's go" Polite (76 / 100)[2] Keegan: "You wanna really do this now?" Impolite (13 / 100) Jordan: "Fuck yeah, let's do it" Impolite (19 / 100) Jordan: "First round's mine" Neutral (43 / 100) [1]: [this video] [2]: Adding a "." to the end of the "Ok let's go" drops it by three points to 73 / 100
> Actively processing voice on someone else's tempo over a crappy mic often leads to mistakes On the flipside, text-only conversation often simply doesn't include that nuance at all. I can't count the number of times I've completely misunderstood someone's tone over text when it would have been blindingly obvious over voice. Key and Peele even did a skit about it: [this video] Voice and text have different strengths and weaknesses as communications media. Both are appropriate in different situations. I will admit, however, to being somewhat "allergic" (as another commenter put it) to voice, probably to an unreasonable extent, because I selfishly value my ability to focus on what I'm doing right now instead of giving it to someone else for a couple of minutes. But at the same time, I've often found that someone older who didn't grow up with easy text-based communication will use a phone call when a text would have been more than sufficient, and this can be quite irritating at times. I suspect it's in reaction to this that younger people tend to avoid voice communication even when it would probably be a better choice.
Correctly interpreting online communication is difficult. What one person considers constructive feedback another person may interpret as negativity. Reminds me of that Key & Peele skit: [this video]
Obviously the AI needs to adjust the support person's voice to match the customer's, so the customer gets back what they give. Prior art from art: [this video]
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