The concept of emotional artificial intelligence or ‘emotion AI’ conjures up visions of humanoid robots in customer service roles, such as the lifelike ‘receptionist’ welcoming guests at a Tokyo hotel. A number of companies have added emotion recognition to their personal assistant robots so they too can have more human-like interactions.
But humanoid robotics is just one of many potential uses for emotion AI technology.
Tech giants, as well as smaller startups, have been investing in emotion AI for over a decade, using either computer vision or voice analysis to recognize human emotions. Many of these companies started with a focus on market research, analyzing and capturing human emotions in response to a product or TV commercial. Commercial deployments are slowly emerging in virtual personal assistants (VPAs), cars, call centers, robotics and smart devices.
Gartner predicts that by 2022, 10% of personal devices will have emotion AI capabilities, either on-device or via cloud services, up from less than 1% in 2018.
New Uses Are Evolving Quickly
By Annette Zimmermann
