In an exclusive interview, Amir Liberman, Founder & CEO of Nemesysco, a leading global provider of voice analysis technology, speaks to Anita Joseph, Editor, Reseller ME, about how a person’s voice can now help to determine the potential for success or failure of a business organisation.
Your voice can now determine your success. Or failure. The Layered Voice Analysis (LVA) technology from global firm Nemesysco is slowly, but surely taking the world by storm and transforming the way people interact and make their choices. Nemesysco recently signed a strategic partnership agreement with Spire Solutions, a value-added distributor in the Middle East and Africa, whereby Spire Solutions will deploy Nemesysco’s voice analytics technology in the HR vertical across the UAE.
A chat with Amir Liberman at the recent GISEC event reveals that this unique technology, which has been under development for many years, is based on a proprietary set of vocal parameters that can identify deceptive intentions in “real life” scenarios. These parameters are identified from a bank of audio files taken in different languages and a numerous settings, including law enforcement investigations, call centres and controlled experiments.
Nemesysco is dedicated to developing advanced and non-invasive applications of its voice analytics solutions, including investigation and security tools, fraud prevention solutions, CRM applications, consumer products and psychological diagnostic tools. “In fact, all of Nemesysco’s products and services are based on LVA and have been developed in order to better understand people,” Liberman says.
But why should businesses use voice analysis solutions to understand people?
“It is important to understand how people really truly feel, whether they are your employees or customers, and capture their genuine emotional cues in order to make sure you respond correctly to their needs and preferences,” Liberman adds. “Our solutions identify various types of stress levels, cognitive processes and emotional reactions that are reflected in different subtle properties of the voice.”
In fact, LVA technology is so accurate that it provides in-depth insights into the way people think, what troubles them, what excites them, what portions of their speech they are uncertain about, what questions require more of their attention, and what areas appear to be sensitive issues for every speaker. What is unique about this voice analytics solution is that the content of what is being spoken or even the language it is spoken in is not important – rather, it focuses on the patterns and anomalies in the speech flow – below the spoken language level – to classify these changes in terms of stress, excitement, confusion and other relevant emotional states.
Nemesysco’s solutions are being widely used in call centres as well as by HR and market research firms, among others, to explore and understand different emotions and personality traits. “In the HR field, for instance, I would like to know if I’m hiring the right person for the right position because wrong placement can be a very expensive mistake. I want to know if this person will add value to the role I have in mind. I would want, for example, an accountant who is detail-oriented and passionate about an organised environment, and a designer who is very creative and excited to think outside the box. It is usually very difficult to tell, with today’s candidates and their impressive qualifications and interview training, who is good for a certain role and who isn’t. It’s not that a particular candidate is good or bad, it’s just that some are better suited to a role in my company than others. Recognising and identifying the right candidate for a certain role will go a great way in enhancing business productivity and outcomes,” Liberman points out.
“To put it in context, LVA does not tell a manager whom to hire or not hire, it just helps the manager highlight a person’s true strengths and weaknesses.”
LVA also provides companies with the tools to explore any identified piece of information in depth. It can be utilised both in real-time (for general overview of any client, employee, suspect or witness), and in offline mode (for more in-depth exploration), using recorded data from almost any source. LVA-based solutions can be configured for different expected work settings, and have built-in mechanism to set their sensitivity automatically to meet different needs.
That’s not all. Going a step further, Nemesysco developed the Emotional Diamond concept in 2012 to simplify the visualisation and understanding of the human emotional complexities as detected by the LVA. “It is built of eight wings,” Liberman says. “Energy” at the top, “Stress” at the bottom, “Logic and Confidence” to the left, “Emotion” to the right, and four additional indications displaying levels of “Passion”, “Uneasy”, “Mental Effort” and “Concentration” (These are only the main eight of the 16 main emotional states LVA can detect).
“The core principle behind the Emotional Diamond is to reflect that there are no absolute good or bad emotions, as they are all context dependent. For example, we would expect to see stressful reactions when discussing intimidating events, and we will look for energetic and emotional reactions when we discuss prospects and achievements. When examining the emotional reactions over time, certain traits can be easily observed, and teach us about the true personality of the evaluated party,” Liberman says.
For the tech-savvy, Liberman explains how it all works:
“When a person talks, he/she can hear their own voice and tune the highs and the lows and the way they sound. So, when talking to someone, everyone can hide their actual feelings to different degrees and keep their voice sounding very neutral and consistent. This makes it very difficult to identify what someone is really experiencing or thinking. With LVA technology, we pick up as many as 151 tiny and inaudible biomarkers from a voice, irrespective of how it sounds in our ears, find ways to combine them and then identify the connection between these biomarkers and various emotions, particularly the key ones such as excitement, confusion, happiness, stress, anger, hesitation and concentration. It is pretty much like holding a microscope to a person’s voice- even the minute details are fetched out.”
So, do you want to know the sound truth about yourself?
