My latest article for TheFeature is about software that detects how engaged you are in your telephone conversations:
Picking up the phone when it rings is like signing a legal contract: "You hereby agree to actively participate in this conversation, responding in a timely manner and allowing the dialogue to run its course. Only with the consent of both parties can this contract be prematurely terminated without holding one of the aforementioned parties liable for rudeness." Of course, other forms of audio communication have very different unspoken contracts. For example, in social situations, push-to-talk over cellular has a lot in common with online instant messaging. Each party agrees to reply to the other when convenient. The conversation is less of a commitment. If mobile video calling takes off, it too will have its own specific terms-of-polite-use. Meanwhile, conference calls require an entirely unique set of rules to avoid a cacophony of separate conversations.
To help negotiate these social mobile-communication contracts, computer scientists at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, are developing software systems that analyze the subtleties of conversation. Unlike automated voice menus or other natural-language processing systems that attempt to identify what we're saying, the PARC software listens for how we're saying it.
