Apple Siri will soon be able to tell if she makes you angry: and it will change everything
SenSay Analytics is the latest project from SRI International, the research lab that gave life to Siri in 2007, and sold it to Apple in 2010, turning it into a powerful virtual assistant on the iPhone, and later on, iPad and eventually Macs as well.
The project aims to enable virtual assistants like Apple Siri to understand when a user is frustrated, angry or confused, by analyzing the tone of a person’s voice, to identify certain triggers that will tell Siri how to respond, depending on the user’s mood.
MIT Technology Review reported on the news this week, bringing up a great example of a pharmaceutical virtual assistant providing information to a patient. If the person’s speech slows down, or the person goes quiet for a period of time after a question from the virtual assistant, the AI will gather that the person may be confused, or not know how to answer, which will prompt the virtual assistant to provide an additional explanation on the last question, automatically.
Similar algorithms can be used to analyze body movements and facial expressions in a variety of scenarios, like questionnaires, online shopping, and other situations where users may need to engage AI in a more articulate and complex conversation.
The use of voice-controlled virtual assistants is still relatively new and sparing, as users have yet to get used to virtual assistants on their desktops, or anywhere outside of the scope of a smartphone. The most frequent queries are typically in regard to seeking directions, finding out movie times, or discovering nearby shopping locations, but this could change in the future, as more companies, including Apple, are looking to integrate the “emotional” element into the experience. For instance, Amazon is looking to enable its own virtual assistant Alexa to detect emotions.
Apple’s interest in “emoting” AI is become apparent, if we think back to the beginning of this year when Apple acquired “Emotient”, a startup who worked on a technology capable of analyzing human facial expressions.
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