KANTATE

Work in call centers and customer service centers demands a high level of concentration, since employees have to retrieve information from different databases such as Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM), product catalogs, etc. during communication with the customer. In order to ensure that a good advice service is provided, good speech intelligibility of the telephone signal and an intelligent, intuitive information system are essential. In the "KANTATE" project, research and development work is being conducted on methods designed to improve man-technology interaction, particularly in relation to the changed sensory and cognitive abilities of older people. To achieve this, the dialog with the customer is recorded by a speech recognition system and then semantically analyzed so that the system can automatically retrieve the relevant information and present this in a transparent manner during the call.

The Oldenburg Branch for Hearing, Speech and Audio Technology HSA is responsible in this project for developing the acoustic recognition technologies and hearing-appropriate reproduction of the speech signal for persons with both normal and impaired hearing. User studies are conducted to evaluate the hearing support algorithms. For this, listening effort is measured by means of electroencephalography (EEG).