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As occupation try out with embed AI everywhere , one unexpected trend is companies deform to AI to help its many newfound bot better understand human emotion .
It ’s an field call “ emotion AI , ” accord to PitchBook ’s newEnterprise Saas Emerging Tech Research reportthat predicts this technical school is on the rise .
The reasoning goes something like this : If businesses deploy AI assistant to execs and employee , make AI chatbotsbe front - line salespeopleandcustomer service reps , how can an AI do well if it does n’t understand the difference of opinion between an wild “ What do you mean by that ? ” and a lost “ What do you mean by that ? ”
Emotion AI claims to be the more advanced sibling of sentiment psychoanalysis , the pre - AI tech that attempts to make pure human emotion from textbook - based interactions , particularly on social media . Emotion AI is what you might call multimodal , engage sensors for visual , audio , and other input signal merge with machine learning and psychological science to attempt to notice human emotion during an fundamental interaction .
Major AI cloud providers tender serving that give developer admission to emotion AI capability such as Microsoft Azure cognitive services ’ Emotion API or Amazon Web Services ’ Rekognition service . ( The latter hashad its share of controversyover the years . )
While emotion AI , even extend as a cloud service , is n’t new , the sudden rise of bots in the workforce give it more of a future in the business existence than it ever had before , according to PitchBook .
“ With the proliferation of AI assistants and fully automated human - auto interactions , emotion AI promises to enable more human - like interpretations and response , ” writes PitchBook ’s Derek Hernandez , senior analyst , emerging engineering science in the report .
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“ Cameras and microphones are built-in part of the hardware side of emotion AI . These can be on a laptop computer , headphone , or singly site in a physical blank space . to boot , wearable computer hardware will likely bring home the bacon another boulevard to employ emotion AI beyond these devices , ” Hernandez tells TechCrunch . ( So if that customer service chatbot asks for photographic camera accession , this may be why . )
To that end , a growing cadre of startups are being launch to make it so . This includes Uniphore ( with$610 million total raised , include $ 400 million in 2022 direct by NEA ) , as well as MorphCast , Voicesense , Superceed , Siena AI , audEERING , and Opsis , each of which also raised modest sum from various VCs , PitchBook estimates .
Of of course , emotion AI is a very Silicon Valley approach : Use engineering to clear a trouble because of using engineering with human race .
But even if most AI bots will finally benefit some form of automate empathy , that does n’t mean this solution will really work .
In fact , the last time emotion AI became of red-hot interest in Silicon Valley — around the 2019 sentence frame when much of the AI / ML globe was still focused on computer visual sense rather than on procreative language and art — researcher throw a pull in the idea . That year , a team of researchers published a meta - reviewof studies and concluded that human emotion can not really be determined by facial movements . In other give-and-take , this idea that we can teach an AI to detect a human ’s feelings by have it mimic how other humans prove to do so ( reading faces , eubstance language , tone of voice ) is somewhat misguided in its Assumption of Mary .
There ’s also the possibility that AI regulation , such as the European Union ’s AI Act , which bans computer - imaginativeness emotion detection systems for certain uses like breeding , may squeeze this idea in the bud . ( Some state laws , like Illinois ’ BIPA , also prohibit biometric recitation from being collected without permission . )
All of which gives a broader coup d’oeil into thisAI - everywhere future tense that Silicon Valleyis presently madly build . Either these AI bot are going to attempt emotional understanding in order of magnitude to do Book of Job like client armed service , salesand HRand all the other undertaking humans hope to attribute them , or maybe they wo n’t be very good at any task that really necessitate that capableness . perchance what we ’re look at is an office life story filled with AIbots on the stratum of Siri circa 2023.Compared with a management - take bot guess at everyone ’s feeling in real time during meetings , who ’s to say which is worse ?
