Imagine taking an important business call in an environment in which 20 or more people are all speaking at once—loudly. This happens in call centers around the world every day. While a number of different methods have tried to address this problem, no solution accomplished the feat—until Tomato.ai’s call center noise cancellation was deployed.
Traditional Call Center Noise Cancellation Strategies
The most commonly employed strategies to reduce call center noise include background sound dampening, background sound masking and noise-canceling headphones. While each of these can be somewhat effective, they each have their drawbacks.
Background Sound Dampening
Entails the installation of sound deadening materials such as carpeting, foam, acoustic panels, ceiling baffles and soundproof glass to keep noise to a minimum. These dampen the sound of voices, which reduces the reverberations that contribute to the cacophony representatives must endure. However, purchasing the materials and having them installed is costly, especially for larger call centers. Sound blocking also does little to resolve the primary concern: a room full of people all talking at once. While reverberations are kept to a minimum, customers can still hear multiple representatives and must hyper focus to tune them out.
Background Sound Masking
Relies upon systems that generate ambient sounds to dampen peripheral conversations. White noise devices are deployed around the call center to “cover up” the frequency range within which most human voices fall. While this can be somewhat successful, masking introduces another layer of sound into the environment. Surrounding voices are muted in the ears of the agent, however the other voices can still be heard by the customers on the other side of the line. Also, other non-voice background noises are still present. Masking also requires the purchase and accurate placement of white noise machines to achieve the best result. Get the deployment wrong and the result is less than satisfactory.
Noise Canceling Headphones
Employ subtractive algorithms to isolate and amplify the desired voice, while eliminating background sounds. This can be tricky in a call center environment, as much of the background sounds are human speech. While noise canceling headphones at times do a reasonable job, clarity can suffer with so much activity occurring within similar frequency ranges.
Enter Artificial Intelligence
Machine learning solutions help AI models learn which sounds are desirable and which should be eliminated. Thus, the algorithm determines which voices to mute and which ones to allow to be heard. The result is quite remarkable. In addition to eliminating background voices, these algorithms improve the clarity of the desired voices, making it easier for customer service representatives to focus their attention on callers.
Benefits of the Tomato.ai Platform
The Tomato.ai noise cancellation solution goes even farther, in that it generates a person’s voice without any of the background sounds. This flips the traditional approaches that attempt to remove any type of noise. The solution uses an innovative generative AI approach, which can generate a person’s voice without requiring any pre-training, or warm up period, reducing onboarding friction for new users.
Customers benefit from a noise-free experience. Call center reps benefit from reduced fatigue and stress levels caused by customers frustrated by noisy call centers. The call center benefits from improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, which are two of the key drivers of a company’s profitability.
