Companies working on artificial intelligence are specializing in add-on technologies that can detect human emotions.
A team of scientists at Intel has come up with an Advanced Emotion Recognition Engine, a highly sophisticated software that can detect seven distinct human emotions: disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise, and contempt.
Dr. Anbang Yao, a senior staff research scientist at Intel Labs China in Beijing, is leading a team that focuses on computer vision. By pairing a visual camera and microphone with smart AI software, scientists are trying to create a machine that can gain insights from digital content and understand a human being's emotional state.
"I'm helping machines see the world like humans do," says Yao.
In the AI industry, most visual recognition systems on the market rely only on visual data. However, the scientists at Intel are weaving both visual and audio data into the software so that they could accurately gauge human emotions.
Although this technology is still being perfected, the feature, so far, looks promising. The automobile sector, for instance, will soon make use of this technology to avoid accidents and other mishaps. When the AI engine is paired with a camera in a car, the vehicle wouldn't start if the technology detects that the driver is intoxicated.
Earlier this week, Affectiva, a company specializing in Artificial Emotional Intelligence (Emotion AI), and Wind River, a company that's working on Internet of Things (IoT) and connected vehicles, announced their collaboration to advance connected car technologies.
