In this technology overpowered world, it now seems impossible to live without PCs, laptops, smartphones and other consumer electronic devices. The prevalence of digital technology and its continuous influence has altered our lifestyles to a point where our dependability on technology has become immense. This has made our connection with technology increasingly complex.
On one hand, we humans struggle to communicate the correct emotions through electronic gadgets in order to understand one another, whereas, on the other hand, emotional AI (artificial intelligence) has taken a huge leap. Face-tracking and recognition technology now has advanced capabilities to analyze even the minutest details of our facial expressions. Some advanced emotion recognition systems can even differentiate between genuine and fake emotions.
What is emotional AI?
Businesses must leverage emotional AI technology to capture people’s emotions in real time. Emotional AI is a technology through which facial expressions can be decoded, voice patterns can be analysed, e-mails can be scanned to understand the tone of language, eye movements can be monitored, neurological immersion levels can be measured etc. For companies, this technology can prove to be a game changer as it can help them understand their customers deeply and make real/personal connections.
According to Gartner, emotion AI capabilities will be present in 10% of personal devices by 2022, a massive increase from 1% in 2018. This could either be on-device or via cloud services. Indeed, a powerful tool, emotional AI will help businesses realign their customer relationship tactics and pave way for new ways and metrics to understand them. Also, resulting in redefining our approach to know more about products and services.
However, as businesses delve into the budding emotional AI technology, the risks associated with it can’t be ignored. The process of interpreting sensitive human emotions and churning out data from it to turn into meaningful insights is a sensitive business. Individuals can consider this as an act of privacy invasion, bias and emotional manipulation. The need for transparency & responsible usage of emotional AI data will be paramount as customers would want to understand how this data is being used after it is collected. According to Accenture, the profit gains are nearly double than that of the average company in a specific industry, when such a company leads in both responsibility and intensity of data usage.
Emotional AI opens new opportunities
For technology and communications companies, with the advent of emotional AI, the pool of opportunity has just opened! A whole new form of data known as “emotional data” is being created, which consists of biometric and psychological data points aggregated through text analysis, eye movement, voice recognition, emotional detection, heart rate, etc.
Since a decade now, while several tech giants and start-ups have been investing in emotional AI, the emerging technology is now also a part of various commercial deployments as well such as digital voice assistants, call centers, cars, smart devices like smartphones, TVs, fitness/health trackers, robotics etc.
Imagine if a smart speaker could identify the mood of person based on their voice’s tone or choice of words. Or perhaps, a camera-enabled TV that can capture the viewer’s emotion by detecting their facial expressions. The new emotional AI applications can result in companies providing better customer service, enhance customer and user experience with perfected UX design. Emotional AI can help businesses understand how customers really feel about them and their products or services.
Even though the technology for emotional AI is still on the rise, the discussions around this topic are increasing consistently, giving an indication that emotional data and emotional AI will be of importance in the future. Emotional AI has the potential to unleash a new universe of possibilities and opportunities.
