T-Pain Wants To Know, On A Scale Of One To Five...

July 12, 2010 5:12 PM

Am I crazy, or is Chase Bank using auto-tune for their CSRs?

So, got a call from Chase today to take a survey about a recent branch visit. I'm 99% sure (there was audible breathing natural to the speaker's end of the conversation) I was talking to a person, but her voice had that odd edge as if it was really a automated service I was talking to. I'm pretty sure it was being processed by a machine.

Did they use something like auto-tune to try and normalize accents to make their CSRs easier to understand?

posted by GamblingBlues to Technology (11 answers total)

There is no magical auto-tune for accents. I bet you were hearing the result of some sort of audio compression, somewhere in the phone system between the CSR and you -- like MP3 compression except more extreme (since it's specialized for voice, which needs less fidelity than music). Could also be some sort of echo cancellation or noise reduction.
posted by xil at 5:20 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

Interesting question. Could have been an unintentional effect of VOIP or long distance transmission., rather than something planned.

The closest thing I know of the the "Viterbi algorithm," an error correction tool used in regular cell phones to amplify the noise signal that's likely human speech over the background noise, but this is ubiquitous, not just for CSRs.
posted by oblio_one at 5:20 PM on July 12, 2010

Sounds more like a text-to-speech engine that is close to passable as a natural voice, but with a few subtle shortcomings that you're noticing.

Or: T-Pain doing "On A Hold."
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:21 PM on July 12, 2010

Reading the above, I suppose compression or jitter artifacts from VOIP transmission might also be it. That tends to sound more like a bad cell connection, though.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:22 PM on July 12, 2010

You might be hearing the vocoder algorithm used in modern telecommunications. The vocoder is Auto-Tune's great granddaddy.
posted by lekvar at 5:45 PM on July 12, 2010 [1 favorite]

For what it's worth, my sister has a cordless phone that exhibits autotune-like artifacts. When I call her, it is immediately obvious that she's on that particular handset.
posted by fake at 5:58 PM on July 12, 2010

Yeah, I doubt it is an on purpose phenomenon. Although it might be an error correction codec that makes stuff up in the audio domain for missing voip packets? I have heard some really strange things coming out of my phone when I am in CSR hell.
posted by gjc at 6:46 PM on July 12, 2010

All I can do here is to add that I had the exact same experience with a Chase phone survey a couple of months ago, so you're not alone. It took a minute or two to convince me that the guy was a live person. Whatever it is, I agree with others who said it could be something unique to the company and how they have their phones and headsets set up.
posted by belau at 6:50 PM on July 12, 2010

I've had this experience several times in the last couple of weeks. Once with Chase and once with Comcast. I don't recall who the other two were with.
posted by FlamingBore at 8:21 PM on July 12, 2010

Nthing the "bad audio compression VoIP connection" and "error-concealment behavior" theories. I've heard tinny, oddly melodic autotune-like artifacts in compressed speech in other situations. Some speech codecs actually are vocoders, for that matter, but I don't know how likely it is that those would turn up on a VoIP link.
posted by hattifattener at 11:54 PM on July 12, 2010

For what it's worth, I have noticed a similar effect on talk radio channels on XM. I wondered about it until I read somewhere that satellite radio uses different compression techniques for voice and music. I bet something similar is happening here, as others have said.
posted by TedW at 7:24 AM on July 13, 2010