Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank recently announced that it is developing an AI-powered “emotion cancellation” technology that will alter the voices of angry customers to sound calmer during phone conversations with customer service representatives. The project aims to reduce the mental burden on operators who suffer from harassment and has been in development for three years. SoftBank plans to release the technology by March 2026, but the idea has drawn mixed reactions online.
According to a report by the Japanese news site Asahi Shimbun, SoftBank's project uses an AI model to change the tone and pitch of customers' voices in real time during calls. Developers, led by SoftBank employee Toshiyuki Nakatani, trained the system using a dataset of more than 10,000 voice samples in which 10 Japanese actors performed over 100 phrases with a range of emotions, including shouting and accusatory tones.
Voice cloning and synthesis technology has come a long way in the past three years. We've previously covered Microsoft's technology that can clone voices with just a three-second audio sample, and Adobe's voice processing technology that resynthesizes a person's voice to improve their voice, but SoftBank's technology is well within reach.
By analyzing voice samples, SoftBank's AI model reportedly learned to recognize and correct voice characteristics associated with anger and hostility: When a customer speaks to a call center operator, the model processes the audio it receives and adjusts the pitch and intonation of the customer's voice to make them sound calmer and less intimidating.
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“For example, high-pitched voices are lowered in tone, while deep male voices are raised in tone. The technology doesn't change the content or phrasing of a customer's conversation, but reportedly retains a slight element of anger to help operators gauge the customer's emotional state. The AI ​​model also monitors the length and content of conversations, sending a warning message if it determines an exchange is too long or unpleasant.”
The technology was developed through SoftBank's internal program, SoftBank InnoVenture, in collaboration with the AI ​​and Beyond Institute, a collaborative AI research institute founded by the University of Tokyo.
Harassment is a deep-rooted problem
According to SoftBank, Japan's hospitality industry is grappling with a problem of “customer harassment,” where employees are subjected to aggressive behavior and unreasonable demands from customers, with the government and companies reportedly exploring ways to protect employees from such harassment.
The problem isn't unique to Japan: In a Reddit thread about SoftBank's AI plans, call center operators in other regions told numerous stories about the stress of dealing with harassment from customers. “I've worked in call centers for a long time. People need to realize that yelling at call center operators doesn't help anything,” one person wrote.
A 2021 ProPublica report told horror stories from call center operators who are trained to stay on the phone no matter how nasty or emotionally humiliating the call. The magazine quoted Skype customer service contractor Kristin Stewart as saying, “Someone called me the C-word. I called my boss. They said, 'Calm them down.' … They always pressured me to stay on the phone and calm the customer myself. I wasn't paid to do that. If a customer is sitting there telling you that you're worthless … you have to 'de-escalate.'”
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But according to Reddit poster Ben Serotile, it's hard to calm an angry customer down with words: “As someone who's worked in several call centers, I can tell you there's no faster way to escalate a call than trying to calm someone down. If the angry person on the other end of the phone thinks you're just trying to appease them and whisk them away somewhere else, they're only going to get angrier.”
Using AI to ignore reality
Harassment of call center workers is a real problem, but the introduction of AI as a solution has some wondering whether filtering emotional reality on demand with voice synthesis is a good idea. As some social media commenters have pointed out, the technology may be a case of treating the symptoms of anger rather than the root cause.
“This is the worst solution to a problem,” one Reddit user wrote in the aforementioned thread. “Reminds me of when all the workers at Apple's China factories started jumping out of the windows due to poor working conditions, and the 'solution' was to put netting around the building.”
SoftBank plans to introduce the emotion cancellation solution in fiscal 2025, which ends March 31, 2026. By reducing the psychological burden on call center operators, SoftBank says it hopes to create a safer work environment where employees can better serve customers.
Still, ignoring customer anger could backfire in the long run if the anger is a legitimate response to poor business practices. As one Reddit user wrote, “If there are so many angry customers that it's affecting the mental health of call center operators, they'd be better off figuring out why so many customers are angry, instead of pretending they're not angry.”
