A Crash Course in Decoding Voices at Work

Want to know what your boss really thought of your idea? Or whether your employees respect you? Pay less attention to their words and listen to their voices. “They’re leaky,” says Allison Gabriel, an associate professor of management at the University of Arizona. “Underlying emotion leaks out, even when outward displays may be pleasant or smiling. Voice is a hard channel to regulate in terms of emotion.” So unless your co-workers are trained voice actors, it will be tough for them to hide their true opinions, whether about profit targets, a company retreat plan, or that new wall color.

Decoding isn’t that hard, says Alan Cowen of Hume AI, a company that uses recordings of voices to teach software such as digital assistants to recognize emotions. He’s mapped thousands of vocalizations and speech-pattern recordings, revealing the meanings in the volume, tone, inflection, cadence, and pauses. “There aren’t many experts who are better at decoding emotional expression than laypeople,” he says.