Never really thought of picking up a phone as a social ‘contract’ of sorts, but I have to say that this article at The Feature certainly makes me think it could be. It turns out that researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center are working on software that will be able to take an active part in how you look at your future phone calls. Isn’t science just weird?

Picking up the phone when it rings is like signing a legal contract: “You hereby agree to actively participate in this conversation, responding in a timely manner and allowing the dialogue to run its course. Only with the consent of both parties can this contract be prematurely terminated without holding one of the aforementioned parties liable for rudeness.” Of course, other forms of audio communication have very different unspoken contracts. For example, in social situations, push-to-talk over cellular has a lot in common with online instant messaging. Each party agrees to reply to the other when convenient. The conversation is less of a commitment. If mobile video calling takes off, it too will have its own specific terms-of-polite-use. Meanwhile, conference calls require an entirely unique set of rules to avoid a cacophony of separate conversations.

To help negotiate these social mobile-communication contracts, computer scientists at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, are developing software systems that analyze the subtleties of conversation. Unlike automated voice menus or other natural-language processing systems that attempt to identify what we’re saying, the PARC software listens for how we’re saying it.

“We’re trying to understand how people get into conversations, participate in them, and then get out,” says researcher Paul Aoki. “That way, we might be able to help smooth the transitions and manage their mobile conversation experiences.”

In one recent effort, Aoki, Allison Woodruff, now at Intel Research Berkeley, and Indiana University professor Chen Yu designed a prototype system that detects user engagement in everyday mobile conversations and reacts accordingly.