Emotion AI may be the next trend for business software and that could be problematic
3 min read
As businesses experiment with embedding AI everywhere, one area starting to gain more attention is Emotion AI.
Emotion AI aims to help AI systems better understand human emotions, potentially revolutionizing business interactions but also presenting new challenges.
The Rise of Emotion AI
As businesses experiment with embedding AI everywhere, one unexpected trend is companies turning to AI to help its many newfound bots better understand human emotion. It’s an area called Emotion AI, according to a recent report predicting this tech is on the rise.
The reasoning is simple: If businesses deploy AI assistants to execs and employees, make AI chatbots be front-line salespeople and customer service reps, how can an AI perform well if it doesn’t understand the difference between an angry ‘What do you mean by that?’ and a confused ‘What do you mean by that?’
What is Emotion AI?
Emotion AI claims to be the more sophisticated sibling of sentiment analysis, the pre-AI tech that attempts to distill human emotion from text-based interactions, particularly on social media.
Emotion AI is multimodal, employing sensors for visual, audio, and other inputs combined with machine learning and psychology to attempt to detect human emotion during an interaction.
Major AI cloud providers offer services that give developers access to Emotion AI capabilities. However, the sudden rise of bots in the workforce give Emotion AI more of a future in the business world than it ever had before.
AI Assistants Getting Emotional
‘With the proliferation of AI assistants and fully automated human-machine interactions, Emotion AI promises to enable more human-like interpretations and responses,’ says a senior analyst in the report.
Cameras and microphones are integral parts of the hardware side of Emotion AI. These can be on a laptop, phone, or individually located in a physical space. Wearable hardware will likely provide another avenue to employ Emotion AI beyond these devices.
To that end, a growing number of startups are being launched to make this tech more accessible. Companies like Uniphore and Superceed are raising significant amounts to drive the development of Emotion AI.
Challenges and Controversies
Of course, Emotion AI is a very Silicon Valley approach: Use technology to solve a problem caused by using technology with humans.
But even if most AI bots will eventually gain some form of automated empathy, that doesn’t mean this solution will really work. A 2019 meta-review concluded that human emotion cannot actually be determined by facial movements.
In other words, this idea that we can teach an AI to detect a human’s feelings by having it mimic how other humans try to do so is somewhat misguided. There’s also the possibility that AI regulation may nip this idea in the bud.
Regulatory Hurdles
AI regulation could significantly impact the development and deployment of Emotion AI.
The European Union’s AI Act bans computer-vision emotion detection systems for certain uses like education. Moreover, some state laws also prohibit biometric readings from being collected without permission.
All of this gives a broader glimpse into this AI-everywhere future that Silicon Valley is currently building. Either these AI bots will attempt emotional understanding to do job tasks, or maybe they won’t be very good at tasks needing that capability.
The Future of AI in Business
Maybe what we’re looking at is an office life filled with AI bots on the level of voice assistants.
Compared with a management-required bot guessing at everyone’s feelings in real time during meetings, who’s to say which is worse?
AI bots are going to attempt emotional understanding in order to do jobs like customer service, sales, and HR. The success of this approach, however, remains to be seen.
While the rise of Emotion AI holds promise, it also brings a series of challenges and uncertainties.
The future of this technology in the business world will heavily depend on its effectiveness and the regulatory frameworks that will shape its development.
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