Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank recently announced its development of AI-powered “emotion cancellation” technology, which will alter the voices of angry customers to sound calmer during calls with customer service representatives. This project, aimed at reducing the psychological burden on operators experiencing harassment, has been in the works for three years. SoftBank plans to launch it by March 2026, but the idea is receiving mixed reactions online.
According to a report by Japanese news site The Asahi Shimbun, SoftBank’s project uses an AI model to change the tone and pitch of a customer’s voice in real-time during a call. Led by employee Toshiyuki Nakatani, SoftBank developers trained the system using a dataset of over 10,000 voice samples, performed by 10 Japanese actors expressing more than 100 phrases with different emotions, including screaming and accusatory tones.
Voice cloning and synthesis technology has advanced significantly in the past three years. Previously, we covered technology from Microsoft that can clone a voice with a three-second audio sample and audio processing technology from Adobe that cleans up audio by resynthesizing a person’s voice, so SoftBank’s technology is certainly plausible.
By analyzing voice samples, SoftBank’s AI model has learned to recognize and modify vocal characteristics associated with anger and hostility. When a customer speaks to a call center operator, the model processes the incoming audio, adjusting the pitch and inflection of the customer’s voice to make it sound calmer and less threatening.
For example, a high-pitched, resonant voice might be lowered, while a deep male voice might be raised to a higher pitch. The technology does not change the content or phrasing of the customer’s speech and retains a slight element of audible anger to ensure the operator can still gauge the customer’s emotional state. The AI model also monitors the length and content of the conversation, sending a warning message if the interaction becomes too long or abusive.
This technology was developed through SoftBank’s internal program called “SoftBank Innoventure” in collaboration with the Institute for AI and Beyond, a joint AI research institute established by the University of Tokyo.
Bullying remains an ongoing problem. According to SoftBank, Japan’s service sector is grappling with the issue of “kasu-hara,” or customer harassment, where workers face aggressive behavior or unreasonable demands from customers. In response, the Japanese government and businesses are exploring ways to protect employees from abuse.
The issue is not unique to Japan. In a Reddit thread on Softbank’s AI plans, call center operators from other regions shared many stories about the stress of dealing with customer harassment. “I worked in a call center for a long time. People need to understand that yelling at call center agents will get you nowhere,” one person wrote.
A 2021 ProPublica report recounts horror stories from call center operators trained not to hang up, no matter how abusive or emotionally degrading the call becomes. The publication quoted Skype customer service contractor Christine Stewart as saying, “One person called me the C-word. I’d call my supervisor. They’d say, ‘Give them a break.’ They’d always try to get me to stay on the phone and put the customer at ease myself. I wasn’t getting paid enough to do that.”
But verbally de-escalating an angry customer is difficult, according to Reddit poster BenCelotil, who wrote, “As someone who has worked in several call centers, let me point out that there is no faster way to escalate a call than to try and calm the person down if the angry person on the other end thinks you are just trying to calm them down and push them elsewhere. They will only get angrier.”
Ignoring reality using AI. Harassment of call center workers is a real problem, but introducing AI as a potential solution raises some concerns. Some people wonder if it’s a good idea to filter emotional reality on demand through voice synthesis. Perhaps this technology treats the symptoms rather than addressing the root cause of anger, as some social media commentators note.
“This is like the worst possible solution to the problem,” one Redditor wrote. “Reminds me when all the workers at the Apple factory in China started jumping out of the windows because of the working conditions, so the ‘solution’ was to put nets around the building.”
SoftBank expects to introduce the emotion cancellation solution within fiscal year 2025, which ends March 31, 2026. By reducing the psychological burden on call center operators, SoftBank aims to create a safer work environment that allows employees to provide better services to customers.
However, ignoring customer anger could backfire in the long run, especially when anger is sometimes a legitimate response to poor business practices. As one Redditor wrote, “If you have so many angry customers that it’s affecting the mental health of your call center operators, then maybe address the reasons you have so many angry customers instead of just pretending they’re not angry