Custom collection and annotation

Emotion-labeled conversational speech for agents that hear frustration

A voice agent that answers correctly while the caller gets angrier is still failing. Turn-level affect labels on natural conversation give an agent something to detect, and give you something to evaluate it against.

Free sample: Name the language and the interaction type. The team labels a representative conversational excerpt with your categories and sends it manually within 48 hours, free of charge.

Collection specification

Discrete labels
Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral per turn across both sides of the exchange
Dimensional labels
Valence and arousal on the same turns, for models that need a trend rather than a class
Speech type
Spontaneous paired conversation, not read prompts, so the affect is occurring rather than performed
Handoff points
Turns annotated where a human would escalate, usable as an evaluation target for handoff timing
Intent
Dialogue acts or your own taxonomy, tracked separately from affect
Coverage
Language, accent, age, device, and noise quotas set per project
Pricing
Custom, scoped to your conditions

Acted emotion teaches an agent to detect acting

Most openly available emotion corpora are performed: actors reading set sentences in a named emotion. Models trained on them learn a clean, exaggerated version of affect that real callers rarely produce, and they degrade the moment a genuinely irritated person speaks in a flat voice.

Labeling spontaneous conversation is harder and the agreement figures are lower, which is exactly why we publish them. What you get in return is affect that occurred rather than affect that was staged.

Evaluation needs the same labels as training

Detecting frustration is only half the requirement. The other half is whether the agent did anything sensible about it, and that cannot be measured without labeled turns to measure against.

The same annotation pass supports both, so an evaluation set and a training set share one schema rather than being reconciled after the fact.

This offer is not the right fit when

  • You need a ready trained emotion classifier rather than labeled data.
  • You only want scripted, acted emotional speech.
  • You want text sentiment labels with no audio.

Get a free labeled sample

  1. Your details
  2. Your project
  3. Verify

Three short steps. The team then follows up manually within 48 hours, and confirms volume, rights, QA, and delivery if you want the scope priced.

Would rather talk it through first? Talk through your label taxonomy

Prepare the brief

Bring a specification your vendors can price consistently

Use the free worksheet to define coverage, rights, delivery fields, held-out rules, and acceptance tests before requesting a collection plan.

Build a dataset specification

Buyer documentation

Specimen data card and provenance structure, evaluation brief template, and acceptance and held-out questions.

Related services

Guides for this decision

Want to talk through your taxonomy first? Category sets, dimensional scales, and agreement thresholds are usually a conversation, not a form field. Book a short call to work through the taxonomy and conditions the labels need to hold up under.