AI Can Soon Understand And Respond To Our Emotions

Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool for assisting us in every aspect of life. Technology changes on a daily basis for the better, but there remains a pressing issue in how complex AI can get. As emotions and the ability to detect them in conversations is what quintessential to a typical human being, if AI cannot do the same, it cannot be a real personality and become more advanced in assisting us in the day-to-day tasks. Inanimate assistants like smart cars and voice assistants without the ability to grasp emotion are still one step behind a real person in fully understand another.

This might change soon enough as engineers are applying the latest technology in their AIs to help them identify emotions in conversations and even behaviors that may stem from them. If this effort is fruitful, new AIs will be more emotionally intelligent and agile.

A Vast Array Of Signals

A typical human being has a wide range of emotions beyond the most basic like angry, happy, or sad. These feelings are expressed via words, tones, and actions. Not everyone has EQ high enough to understand what another person feels entirely, so for a machine, that task is even more difficult.

The way experts are going to fulfill the task of giving AIs the ability to identify emotions is to map out how we experience these feelings and then teach these machines the signs associated with them. The graphic below can give you a general idea of various shades of human emotions:

The significant categories include fear, love, joy, sadness, anger, and surprise. Under them are over 50 emotional shades. Some of them depend on situations and can lead to specific behaviors, which makes it extremely hard to identify. This is why AIs have to judge and label an emotion on a human based on both patterns.

Recognizing Emotions In Voice

We may think that technology is developing at a skyrocketing pace, but things like chatbots and AIs are still at an infant stage. Voice assistant and the like are unable to tell if a customer is pleased or angry, making them unsuitable to be in charge of a more vital role in sales or customer service, let alone replacing human staff entirely.

AIs are relying on words as the chief way to gather information, but the problem here is, they are just part of what they need to detect. We do not usually express ourselves directly in sentences and words, but rather, in the way we say what we say. Research has shown that what we say is not a reliable indicator of our moods. If you want to identify emotions, paying attention to tones is advisable.

Emotional prosody, a person’s tones of voices, can be expressed via speed, volume, pitch, timbre, and the way that person pauses. A prime example of this is when we can feel the sarcasm in someone’s speech. We do not understand that by words, we judge based on tones. The prosody can even impact our word choice, how we use clauses or phrases, and also make us generate sounds unrelated to conveying the meaning of words.

When it comes to non-linguistic sounds, there is a field called behavior signal processing dedicated to studying hidden messages in a human voice. Experts are using AI technology and behavioral science to develop this branch of study. For the time being, behavioral signals are being collected and recorded to identify behaviors, emotions, and perceived thoughts, while speech, metadata, and text provide information on ideas and beliefs. The point here is human is not made up of 0s and 1s, and our emotions are expressed in a large number of ways. This calls for a system capable of observing, evaluating, and communicating, as well as drawing information from various sources in order to respond at the usual speed of a typical human.

Designing Better Interfaces Between Machines And Humans

This new technology has been in use in enterprises for some time now. They utilize it to exploit better the unstructured information they are having at hand, gathered for years of doing business. A foundation made by chat histories, call recordings, and support tickets are helping firms understand the kind of emotion their customers are experiencing and how the moods can affect their final decisions regarding the company's products or services.

The context in which customers interact is another aspect that can benefit from this new studying field. Before this breakthrough, an individual staff is required to evaluate if a customer can be a prospect. In both customer service and sales section, the team must converse or interact with customers in some ways and then record what they feel and how they respond. This information is always of great value, but it has to be written in a specific format to be analyzed in the future.

Modern AIs are pushing the boundary to the point that they can make use of primary data, which are what customers and prospects say and react to know what they want and when they want it. This much insight is more extensive than we have ever been able to gain and it is on the way to increase quickly.

This evolvement is paving the way for improving AI assistants. Enterprises may expect to be able to understand what customers need from them better, thus making a timely and accurate response. The systems already been in offices and houses can get a similar upgrade. Smartphones and virtual assistants may have the ability to grasp the contexts and emotions hidden in the words you say and can respond to them in the way an average human would do.

Human emotional shades are identified and recorded in a more detailed and thorough way than ever before in the history of humankind, building the base for the next, more advanced generations of artificial intelligence that are emotionally intelligent. There is no doubt that this is what the future looks like for us and we are heading there fast.