
Call routing based on the caller's mood - JoshTriplett
https://patents.google.com/patent/US6411687B1/en
======
yosamino
> The apparatus therefore permits caller's having special needs to be
> automatically routed to suitably trained attendants.

... so last time I was on the phone with my ISP about the issue of ipv6
availability and after waiting for the _surpringly_ short, yet still
_infuriatingly_ long time of 55 minutes, I got a hold of a clueless operator,
only to be dropped at exactly the 60 minute mark.

Calling back swearing and pressing all the buttons ( so it had been my third
or fourth time trying to get through that day... not so proud of it) yielded a
different operator after almost 30 seconds. Judging by the way he handled my
call (I didn't continue swearing, the people answering the phone are not at
fault for shitty staffing decisions), I can only assume he was specially
trained.

( I continue to be unsuccessfull in even having any ISP representing operator
understand either what ipv6 even is or comprehend that while they claim it's
available, it is not. I continue to not understand how they haven't been
trained to be just _aware_ that a thing called "the internet protocol" exists
while they work for a company whose primary product is the provision of said
protocol. )

On the other hand I discovered a shortcut though their automated phone system.
I just don't think the reward system is biased to the bettering of humanity
there...

~~~
dspillett
It may not be your mood: if your number is logged as having called several
times already that day you might be routed through to a higher level support
operator because that is a sign of a more complex problem.

~~~
chrismorgan
I wonder if that in itself could be a shortcut: dial, navigate the menu until
you’re waiting for an operator, then hang up; dial, navigate, hang up; dial,
navigate, get escalated automatically—total time several minutes rather than
the best part of an hour or even more.

~~~
kfrzcode
Usually I just smash the zero key on my phone and 9/10 times I'm directly
connected to a human. If that fails I swear obtusely and ask for a "fucking
human." If THAT fails I give up. I have no patience for robots who don't
listen to me.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Yeah, the same things piss me off too.

Either let me fix it myself, dont have fucking braindead "policies" that are
anti-customer, and bloody respond when someone has a problem.

Recently had an ebay stupid. Because a bit was flipped differently than they
thought it _should_ be on their backend, gave random bullshit errors.

The procedure here should be: fix your goddamned system to autocorrect it, or
automatically put me in touch with a chat agent to fix it on their end.

------
blauditore
Isn't this too trivial to be patented? I mean, the complex part of such a
machine would be the implementation of mood, word and other detectors, but as
far as I can tell, that's not part of this patent.

By that logic, one could patent a machine for finding better hiring candidates
by running their CVs through a "programming skills detector" and "soft skills
detector", then filtering based on their output.

~~~
helb
They don't call it "skills detector", but…
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US5197004A/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US5197004A/en)
("Method and apparatus for automatic categorization of applicants from resumes
")

~~~
blauditore
Wow, this is ridiculous. It's a bit more complex than the call routing one,
but still not much more than a high-level feature specification.

~~~
bpicolo
Good news is it has expired. The world of software patents frequently feels
like "oh ok so you did something we already do, but with a computer", and it's
amazing that translates into patents.

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chrismorgan
Note the priority date: 1997-11-11. This patent has thus just expired.

It probably wasn’t _quite_ so obvious back then, though still it’s more or
less just chaining a few other other patented things together in a fairly
straightforward way. (It is interesting to note that the speech-analysis-for-
emotion-detection patent it cites had just expired a few months prior. I do
not know if that is significant or not.)

------
somecallitblues
How can a generic idea like this be patented? This is bullshit!

~~~
turc1656
You think this is bad? Apple has a design patent on a rectangular display
device with rounded corners.
[http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1701443/USD670286S1.pdf](http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1701443/USD670286S1.pdf)

As if any self respecting engineer would design a device with sharp corners.

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sjwright
This reeks of patenting an existing idea. Prior art is surely in the actions
of manual phone operators who encounter moody callers. _Merely_ adding
computers to a mechanism does not automatically make it a novel invention.

~~~
hirsin
By that logic the nail gun is invalidated by the prior art of swinging
hammers... Automating a mechanism, or even just more efficiently automating
it, should be patentable.

~~~
sjwright
Novel inventions that comprise a specific nail gun mechanism should be
patentable. The concept of mechanizing nail insertion should not be.

This is not a patent on voice analysis algorithms to detect a human's mood,
it's just taking an existing invented workflow and replacing "human analysis"
with "computer analysis".

------
SQL2219
But will it recognize sarcasm?

