By Nadia Zaifulizan
The world’s increasing expectations towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) has now evolved into the depths of emotional comprehension. Since AI produces the best version of technological outputs, many of its benefits are leveraged across industries for valuable outcomes. Based on AI’s overall performance in the current technological scene, the interest in AI’s potential is now inclined towards the ability to understand human emotions and how to respond to them.
Human emotions and feelings are strong indicators of what is likeable and accepted by people, and what is not. Advertisers seek substantial emotional response to see if their campaign is well-liked. Companies find clues from customer feedbacks and reviews to determine if their products or services are received positively. Even the average virtual assistant at home or on mobile phones thrive on human response to know what their users prefer. In some cases, emotions and feelings are also extrapolated to know the subject’s motives, especially in cases of suspected crime.
The Challenge of Emotions Detection
Unfortunately, detecting emotions is naturally difficult. Human emotions are very subjective and contextual. Emotions are expressed not only through various ways and channels, they also require deeper instincts and observations. Currently, human emotions are only successfully detected by fellow humans. Even when facial expressions, voice patterns, and eye movements are analyzed and decoded, their subjective nature means that each person’s emotions are relatively different. Sometimes, even if the responses are similar, the emotions associated with each response can be entirely different. In addition, cultural differences after years of personal experience cannot always be detected by an AI.
An emotional AI is prone to bias towards some ethnicity more than others. AI’s biases also exist in terms of culture, age, gender, and personality. To overcome this, incorporating different emotional AIs in one function is better for accuracy and impact than using each AI technology on their own.
What the Future Holds
Emotions tracking is powerful. If the emotional AI can achieve effective “emotions tracking” by overcoming their respective biases, the possibilities for many industries in the future will be endless. By using emotional AI for emotions tracking, businesses can:
- Learn about the product or service features that produce the most emotional engagements for consumers.
- Improve customers and clients’ satisfaction.
- Design services or user experience that is most beneficial for the customers in their specific emotional state, especially in teaching and training.
- Provide socially supportive services that are prepared to cater to users’ emotional needs, such as solving loneliness problems by using AI.
Emotional AI holds the key to many businesses and services expectations of the future. Although it might take several years before the next breakthrough of emotional AI, the world is certainly anticipating its massive impact.