The Beginning – When everything finally falls into place
When Nadine Selim interviews for her dream position at Amazon, she hesitates until the last minute whether to accept it and leave her old job, which is just as good as the future offer. During this same time, Nadine is about to have one of her most exciting moments – becoming a mother. Yet she gets the job at Amazon and leaves her old position.

The tech industry and the support it provides to expectant parents
Back then, she still had no worries about being pregnant and the likelihood of losing her job when she gave birth, as she knew about the good maternity leave benefits offered by the tech giants. Benefits that many believe are partly designed to attract more members of the fairer sex into the male-dominated tech industry. And when the most long-awaited and emotional moment came for Selim, and every woman and mother-to-be – she stepped away from work for a while on maternity leave.

The email that clouds the happiness of a mother
But just a few weeks after that, Selim received an email saying she was being laid off. And so she became one of the hundreds of thousands of employees who were laid off by companies that offered good working conditions.

The tech industry and the promise it broke?
According to Slate, among the mass layoffs that have taken place in the tech sector in recent months, the number of laid-off women is quite large, and even many of them have received the unpleasant memo while on maternity leave, and Selim is one of them.

Some time ago, we told you about the story of a man, again an employee at a large tech company, who lost his job during fatherhood. The tech industry doesn’t seem to take into account the social situation of its employees, and the redundancy trend, which is slightly contained for now, threatens every single member of it, whether they are in a high position, have a lot of experience or have just become a parent and need support.

The key here is using a human voice to train the AI. Callan Scheballa, a project manager with Five9, explained:

“At the end of the day people are going to understand that they are talking to a machine, they are going to understand that they are talking to software.”

He added:

“Yet, the voice that it uses, there’s no reason for it to not sound great. Now, the more. lifelike that it can sound, at least in our experience, the better the reception of the customers that are going to be talking to it.”

Five9 auditioned actors in London and decided on Joseph Vaughn to record a series of scripts for the company, in turn to find their latest voice.

That audio was then broken down into sounds and tones rather than words. It’s enabling the AI program to recreate not only sentences but also distinct moods.

The software is trained to detect word combinations and tones in the caller’s voice so that it can respond to their emotional state as well. Rhyan Johnson, an engineer from Wellsaid labs who is involved in the project, said:

“We are capturing all of the audio data and all of the combination of frequencies and vibrations that are inherent to a voice, that as a human we would recognise is a voice, but the machine just is guessing sounds.”

The company says their AI agents have already answered more than 82 million calls for healthcare providers, large retailers as well as insurance companies, banks, local businesses, and state and local governments.

The new Virtual Voiceover tech will be available next year.