When MIT's Media Lab team studied one of the largest's providers of call center outsourcing, they found something curious that helped them predict the success or failure of almost every call -- within just a few second of the call! And oddly enough, they studied neither the specific words that the operators used nor the logic of their conversations, but only the physical voice signal: the measured variations in tone and pitch. Successful operators, it turns out, speak little and listen much. When they do speak, their voices fluctuate strongly in amplitude and pitch.
