Auto-Tune and AI
This article first appeared in The Supportive Weekly, a newsletter for customer support professionals and every customer-centric leader.
Where do you stand on Auto-Tune? Alongside the Death Cab boys in their awareness raising campaign against Auto-Tune abuse; With T-Pain at his most deliberately artificial (or nautical), rather than his natural state?
Are you one of the people leaving the 700th tedious comment on the bottom of a 1980s music video about how this is “real music, people with actual talent, not auto-tuned like today’s so-called stars� (1)
The Auto-Tune debate really began in 1998, when Cher asked if we believed, and sang the lament of every customer waiting for a support response:
“What am I supposed to do? Sit around and wait for you? Well, I can’t do that And there’s no turning backâ€
Suddenly, we (2) all knew about Auto-Tune. Cher, in making the sound very obviously artificial, deliberately showcased the technology. T-Pain would later build his musical career on the same technique.?
In most cases though, Auto-Tune was used more subtly, to nudge voices back onto pitch, rather than shove them around violently. Its inventor, Dr. Andy Hildebrand, had originally worked for Exxon on locating oil deposits before adapting his algorithmic techniques to musical pitch.
According to the original patent, Hildebrand was trying to make songs sound more emotional, not more robotic:?
When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost. Correcting intonation, that is, measuring the actual pitch of a note and changing the measured pitch to a standard, solves this problem and restores the performance.
Auto-Tune can be applied in ways that, for most of us, are undetectable. A little behind-the-scenes help that allows the artist to concentrate on their expressiveness and character during a performance, even if they are slightly off pitch now and then.
Few people are complaining about that sort of technological assistance, because they don’t know it’s there. It’s the musical equivalent of praising celebrities for their “no makeup†beauty, when it’s actually just “celebrities with more subtle makeupâ€
I’m sure you can see where this is going.
AI = Auto-Tuning support.
Is auto-tuning ourselves what we’re doing with generative AI tools in customer support? The analogy holds pretty well, I think.
We’ll see some companies who use a little AI-assistance to speed up and smooth out their support, and maybe to teach newcomers, while still creating a consistent, human-touch support experience.?
Others will lean into automation, taking the “we only offer fully automated help, and that’s how we keep costs down†route. They won’t hide the artificial edges, they’ll highlight them. Everybody will know what they’re signing up for, and can make their choice.
Where we may see more backlash is for companies in the middle, those who try to rely on AI answers without having built the underlying structure of good human service. Without skilled people there to monitor quality, to make judgement calls on where and when to allow AI, to write the high quality original answers the AI is fed on, the best they can hope for is to reach absolute mediocrity.?
Just as some musicians expressly avoid Auto-Tune and Melodyne, some companies will build their service reputation on human-only service. There will be a market willing to pay more for it.?
Most of us will probably be using AI tools to varying degrees, negotiating where and how they are applied and who is responsible for them. If we get it right, the technology will never be what our customers focus on. Customers don't care that a typo was fixed by spellcheck before they received your answer. It's just a tool that has made things better.? They shouldn’t be forced to care about any other tools either.
It's never about the tools, really. It's the attitude, the systems, and the people. So use whatever tools you can to improve your customer’s experience in a way that is sustainable for everybody in the long term.?
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1. I need someone to create a new illustration for the survivorship bias where, instead of the usual plane diagram, it has a band that has remained popular since the '80s.
2. I acknowledge that some of you probably were not around in 1999, but I do not like it.