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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 15 2016, @09:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the stay-calm-and-take-your-meds dept.

SRI International, the Silicon Valley research lab where Apple's virtual assistant Siri was born, is working on a new generation of virtual assistants that respond to users' emotions.

As artificial-intelligence systems such as those from Amazon, Google, and Facebook increasingly pervade our lives, there is an ever greater need for the machines to understand not only the words we speak, but what we mean as well—and emotional cues can be valuable here (see "AI's Language Problem").

"[Humans] change our behavior in reaction to how whoever we are talking to is feeling or what we think they're thinking," says William Mark, who leads SRI International's Information and Computing Sciences Division. "We want systems to be able to do the same thing."

[...] The system is designed to identify emotional state based on a variety of cues, including typing patterns, speech tone, facial expressions, and body movements.

SenSay could, for example, add intelligence to a pharmacy phone assistant. It might be able to tell from a patient's pattern of speech if he or she were becoming confused, then slow down.

The machine-learning-based technology is trained on different scenarios, depending on how it will be used. The new virtual assistants can also monitor for specific words that give away a person's mental state.

It works via text, over the phone, or in person. If someone pauses as he or she types, it could indicate confusion. In person, the system uses a camera and computer vision to pick up on facial characteristics, gaze direction, body position, gestures, and other physical signals of how a person is feeling.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @03:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @03:52PM (#402326)

    What is the first "H" for?