Detecting nervousness on the telephone (patent)

Businesses need a way to detect nervousness on the telephone, says a recent patent, which offers a computerised means of accomplishing this.

Inventor Valery Petrushin obtained his doctorate in computer science from the Glushkov Institute for Cybernetics, Kiev, and now works in Illinois in the US. His patent, granted last year, is for “detecting emotion in voice signals in a call centre“.

A simple flow chart illustrates “a method for detecting nervousness in a voice in a business enviroument to prevent fraud”. We see the following three statements, each enclosed in its own box: “Receiving voice signals from a person during a business event”; “Analysing the voice signals for determining a level of nervousness of the person during the business event”; “Outputting the level of nervousness of the person prior to completion of the business event”….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

BONUS: Video of the inventor talking about his research: